Sam Hill is really bad at finding his way from place to place. The world is full of people like Hill—and their opposites, who always seem to know exactly where they are and how to get where they want to go. It has proved hard to explain why. However, with the development of technology, there's new excitement happening in the research world.
An experiment was carried out in 2022 to find out what might influence way finding ability. Researchers developed an online game in which players travel by boat to find where a lot of checkpoints lie. The game asked players to provide basic background information , and nearly four million people worldwide did so. Through the game, the researchers were able to judge navigational (辨识方向的) ability by looking at how far each person traveled to reach all the cheek points. Then they compared players' performance with their background information.
The researchers found that Northern Europeans seemed to be better navigations, perhaps because they love orienteering (定向越野), a sport which involves cross- country running and navigation. And those from cities with more disorganized street networks (网状系统) did better than those from cities with orderly ones. Perhaps people of planned cities don't need to build complex (复杂的) maps in their minds.
Research results like these suggest that people's life experience decides how well they find their way. In fact experience may even explain a popular belief that men are more likely to perform better than women. It turns out that this difference is more a question of culture and experience than of in born ability. Northern Europeans, for example, show almost no gender (性别) difference in navigation. However, men do much better than women in places where women face cultural limits on exploring their environment on their own.
That finding is also supported by studies on the Tsimane, a community living in a forest in South America. Researchers put GPS units on 305 Tsimane people to check their daily movements over a three-day period, and found no difference between men and women in navigational ability. Even children performed very well—a result, researchers think, of growing up in an environment that encourages children to explore the forest.
