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People in Nordic countries, North America, Australia, and New Zealand have the best spatial navigational abilities, according to a new study led by UCL and the University of East Anglia.

Researchers assessed data from over half a million people in 57 countries who played a specially-designed mobile game, which has been developed to aid understanding into spatial navigation, a key indicator in Alzheimer鈥檚 disease.

With so many people taking part the team were able to reveal that spatial navigation ability across all countries declines steadily across adulthood.

However, a country鈥檚 GDP also had a significant bearing with Nordic countries among the highest performing along with those in North America, Australia, and New Zealand.

And men performed better than women, but the gender gap narrowed in countries with greater gender equality, according to the study published today in Current Biology.

The paper is the first publication of findings from a collaborative project led by Deutsche Telekom, using the mobile game 鈥楽ea Hero Quest鈥�, which is seeking to establish benchmarks in navigation abilities in order to help dementia research.

鈥淲e鈥檝e found that the environment you live in has an impact on your spatial navigation abilities,鈥� said the study鈥檚 lead author, Professor Hugo Spiers.

鈥淲e鈥檙e continuing to analyse the data and hope to gain a better understanding of why people in some countries perform better than others.鈥�

The research team, which includes 捆绑SM社区 Professor V茅ronique Bohbot, has so far collected data from over four million people who have played Sea Hero Quest. In the mobile game, people play as a sea explorer completing a series of wayfinding tasks.

For the current study, the researchers restricted the data to those who had provided their age, gender and nationality, and were from countries with at least 500 participants.

As part of their analysis, the research team corrected for video game ability by comparing participants鈥� main results to their performance in tutorial levels which assessed aptitude with video games.

While age most strongly correlated with navigational performance, researchers also found that country wealth, as measured by GDP (gross domestic product), correlated with performance. The researchers say this relationship may be due to associations with education standards, health and ability to travel. They focused on GDP for this analysis as it was a standard metric available for every country, but as part of the ongoing research project they will follow up with further comparisons of other factors.

The researchers also speculate about more specific factors. Top performing countries including Finland, Denmark, and Norway all share a national interest in orienteering, a sport relying on navigation, while the other top performing countries 鈥� New Zealand, Canada, the United States, and Australia 鈥� all have high rates of driving, which may also boost navigation ability.

Comparing the country-level results to the World Economic Forum鈥檚 Gender Gap Index, the researchers found a correlation between country-wide gender inequality and a larger male advantage in spatial navigation ability. The gender gap in game performance was also smaller in countries with greater economic wealth.

鈥淥ur findings suggest that sex differences in cognitive abilities are not fixed, but instead are influenced by cultural environments, such as the role of women in society,鈥� said study co-author Dr Antoine Coutrot, who completed the research at UCL before moving to the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS).

Gender equality has previously been found to eliminate differences in maths performance in school. The current study is the first to connect gender inequality to a more specific cognitive measure.

The researchers say that, in the future, an adapted version of the game, first launched by Deutsche Telekom in 2016, may be used as a screening tool for an early warning sign of dementia, as well as a means to monitor disease progress and as an outcome measure for clinical trials.

鈥淪tandard current tests for dementia don鈥檛 effectively tap into the primary initial symptom of being disoriented in space, so we are trying to find an easy way of measuring that, efficiently validated by crowd-sourcing our data,鈥� said Professor Spiers.

鈥淚t鈥檚 promising to see that the effect of nationality is relatively small, as it suggests that the game could be used as a relatively universal test for spatial navigation abilities,鈥� said co-lead author Professor Michael Hornberger (The University of East Anglia).

The study was conducted by researchers at UCL, the University of East Anglia, 捆绑SM社区, Bournemouth University, ETH Zurich and Northumbria University.

The data collected by Sea Hero Quest is stored in a secure T-Systems server in Germany and all analysis by the UCL and UEA-led team is conducted on entirely anonymous data. From September 2018, Deutsche Telekom will be providing access to this unprecedented data set in order to aid future discoveries, not only in dementia but across the wider field of neuroscience research. Access will be granted via a bespoke, secure web portal, allowing cloud based analysis of the data. It is facilitated by T-Systems.

鈥淲e are excited to announce that we will be making this unique data set accessible to researchers across the world to continue to support studies of this kind,鈥� said Deutsche Telekom Chief Brand Officer, Hans-Christian Schwingen. 鈥淪ea Hero Quest demonstrates the power of mobile technology in helping to collect important data at scale, advancing research into some of the most pressing healthcare issues of our time.鈥�

鈥淭he data from Sea Hero Quest is providing an unparalleled benchmark for how human navigation varies and changes across age, location and other factors. The ambition is to use these data insights to inform the development of more sensitive diagnostic tools for diseases like Alzheimer鈥檚, where navigational abilities can be compromised early on. With such a huge number of people participating in Sea Hero Quest, this really is only the beginning of what we might learn about navigation from this powerful analysis,鈥� said Tim Parry, Director at Alzheimer鈥檚 Research UK, which funded the analysis.

For more information including multimedia content, or to speak to the researchers involved, please contact Chris Lane, UCL press office: T: +44 (0)20 7679 9222 / +44 (0)7717 728 648, E: chris.lane [at] ucl.ac.uk

鈥�Global determinants of navigation ability,鈥� by听Coutrot, A., Silva, R., Manley, E., de Cothi, W., Sami, S., Bohbot, V. D., Wiener, J. M., H枚lscher, C., Dalton, R.C., Hornberger, M., & Spiers, H. J., was published in Current Biology.

Further information about the Sea Hero Quest initiative is available at:

Further information about Deutsche Telekom is available at:

About UCL (University College London)

UCL was founded in 1826. We were the first English university established after Oxford and Cambridge, the first to open up university education to those previously excluded from it, and the first to provide systematic teaching of law, architecture and medicine. We are among the world's top universities, as reflected by performance in a range of international rankings and tables. UCL currently has over 39,000 students from 150 countries and over 12,500 staff. Our annual income is more than 拢1 billion

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About the University of East Anglia

The University of East Anglia (UEA) is a UK Top 15 university. Known for its world-leading research and outstanding student experience, it was awarded Gold in the Teaching Excellence Framework. UEA is a leading member of Norwich Research Park, one of Europe鈥檚 biggest concentrations of researchers in the fields of environment, health and plant science.

About Alzheimer鈥檚 Research UK

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• Our animation 鈥淲hat is dementia?鈥� explains the essentials of dementia and the diseases that cause it
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• To help us defeat dementia, donate today by visiting or calling 0300 111 5555.
• We are currently supporting pioneering dementia research projects worth over 拢31 million in leading Universities across the UK.

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