There was a stretch in my early childhood where my parents struggled with how to schedule my summers. I wasn’t a girl scout, wasn’t sporty (although my mother and I always said we were training for the cuddle-lympics), and my family’s favorite activity was watching old movies. Luckily I found a theater camp I loved and scored well enough on standardized tests to go to super nerd camp, because traditional sleepaway camp just wasn’t my thing. Now researchers are saying that my growing up not having frolicked and forayed outdoors as a kid has likely hindered the development of my sense of direction. To which I say to these researchers, tell me about it! Knowable Magazine just reported on results gathered globally, and all roads lead to experience counting more than “innate ability” when it comes to being a good navigator. A few highlights:

Making a game of it: A remarkable, large-scale experiment led by Hugo Spiers, a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London, gave researchers a glimpse at how experience and other cultural factors might influence wayfinding skills. Spiers and his colleagues … developed a game for cellphones and tablets, Sea Hero Quest, in which players navigate by boat through a virtual environment to locate a series of checkpoints. The game app asked participants to provide basic demographic data, and nearly 4 million worldwide did so. … Through the app, the researchers were able to measure wayfinding ability by the total distance each player traveled to reach all the checkpoints. … Then Spiers and his colleagues could compare players’ performance to the demographic data.

A matter of culture: Several cultural factors were associated with wayfinding skills, they found. People from Nordic countries tended to be slightly better navigators, perhaps because the sport of orienteering, which combines cross-country running and navigation, is popular in those countries. Country folk did better, on average, than people from cities. And among city-dwellers, those from cities with more chaotic street networks such as those in the older parts of European cities did better than those from cities like Chicago, where the streets form a regular grid, perhaps because residents of grid cities don’t need to build such complex mental maps.

Another win for gender equality: Results like these suggest that an individual’s life experience may be one of the biggest determinants of how well they navigate. Indeed, experience may even underlie one of the most consistent findings — and cliches — in navigation: that men tend to perform better than women. Turns out this gender gap is more a question of culture and experience than of innate ability. Nordic countries, for example, where gender equality is greatest, show almost no gender difference in navigation. In contrast, men far outperform women in places where women face cultural restrictions on exploring their environment on their own, such as Middle Eastern countries.

Skills that make good navigators: These include the ability to estimate how far you’ve traveled, to read and remember maps (both printed and mental), to learn routes based on a sequence of landmarks and to understand where points are relative to one another. Much of the research, though, has focused on two specific subskills: route-following by using landmarks — for example, turn left at the gas station, then go three blocks and turn right just past the red house — and what’s often termed “survey knowledge,” the ability to build and consult a mental map of a place.

Mixing methods is best: Not surprisingly, better navigators may also be better at switching modes and choosing the most appropriate navigational strategy for the situation they find themselves in, says cognitive neuroscientist [Steven] Weisberg, now at the University of Florida. This could mean using landmarks when they are obvious and mental maps when more sophisticated calculations are needed. “I’ve moved toward thinking that our better navigators are also using a lot of alternate strategies,” Weisberg says. “And they’re doing so in a much more flexible way that affords different kinds of navigation, so that when they find themselves in a new situation, they’re better able to find their way.”

[From Knowable Magazine]

So scientific results show that the more you do something, the better you get at it. What a concept! But I’m gonna be glass half-full about this and say that what I didn’t learn in practical navigation in my youth, I’ve made up for in spades when it comes to navigating theatrical story structure. And that has to count for something! I also have to say that it kind of warms my heart that researchers are diving into this topic in the age of smartphones. Which brings me to what I didn’t excerpt above, the way the article ends by addressing the big GPS elephant in the room. Not surprisingly, GPS usage makes even the best of navigators lose some of their skillset. So as long as we have a network and power, anyone can get around. Short of those tools, look out for landmarks, build up a mental map, and always take that left turn at Albuquerque.

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