Navigation usually refers to the act of directing a ship or aircraft (飞行器) from one place to another, or the science of finding a way from one place to another. However, growing up in a city, according to a vast global survey, has a lifelong negative impact on a person's ability to navigate. When looking for a half-remembered restaurant in a poorly-lit side street, it seems Country Mouse would be a more useul companion.
In the new study, posted to the online repository bioRxiv, scientists led by Antoine Coutrot at Nantes University in France and Hugo Spiers at University College London describe how they used a dataset gathered from 4m players of a computer game called "Sea Hero Quest''，which tests way-finding skills by asking players to memorise a map showing the location of checkpoints and thenmeasuring how well players can steer a boat to find them, guided only by their mental map.
From that database, Dr Spiers and his colleagues found that the strongest indicator of a high score was a player's age—older people performed relatively poorly. But the benefit of rural living was strong enough to offset (抵消）some of that. Data from American players showed that a 70-year-old who grew up in the countryside had the navigational abilities of an average 60-year-old across the dataset.
The gap between the navigation skills of rural and city people was largest in America (about six times wider than for Romania), and the researchers think they know why. They foimd that countries dominated by simple layouts grid-based (网格式街道布局) cities (most common in America and Argentina) dragged down navigation skills more than growing up in a city based on more complicated networks of streets, such as Prague.
Although cities may appear more elaborate, they also feature more clues to help residents find their way, such as numbered streets.
