Can you guess where something is based on the address or cross streets alone? If someone were to reference a local landmark, such as mountains, the ocean or a distinctive building, would that help to situate you? Or do you primarily depend on your smartphone map to get yourself places?
As a child in Chicago, Stephanie de Silva found that the city helped her get where she was going. Streets included directional names like “West” or “North,” and they often met at neat right angles. If all else failed, Lake Michigan could situate her.
But when Ms. de Silva, 23, moved to London, where she now studies cognitive science, she suddenly could not navigate to a restaurant two blocks from home without a smartphone map. The streets were often crooked. Sometimes, they seemed to lead nowhere.
“I don’t think the cardinal directions exist here,” she said. “I’ve lived here for six months now, and I don’t know which direction I’m facing.”
Scientists in Ms. de Silva’s lab at University College London, along with colleagues in Britain and France, have now arrived at an explanation: People who grow up in predictable, gridlike cities like Chicago or New York seem to struggle to navigate as easily as those who come from more rural areas or more intricate cities.
Those findings, published in Nature, suggest that people’s childhood surroundings influence not only their health and well-being but also their ability to get around later in life. Much like language, navigation is a skill that appears to be most malleable when people’s brains are developing, the researchers concluded.
The authors hope the findings eventually lead to navigation-based tests to help diagnose Alzheimer’s disease. Getting lost can sometimes occur earlier in the course of the illness than memory problems, they said.
Researchers have developed virtual navigation tests for cognitive decline, but they can interpret the results only if they know what other factors influence people’s way-finding abilities.
Among the forces shaping people’s navigation skills, the study suggested, was what kind of places they experienced as a child.
“The environment matters,” said Hugo Spiers, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London and one of the study’s lead authors. “The environment we’re exposed to has a knock-on effect, into the 70s, on cognition.”
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