Global Determinants of Navigation Ability

Antoine Coutrot (1) , Ricardo Silva (2) , Ed Manley (2) , Will de Cothi (2) , Saber Sami (3) , Véronique D Bohbot (4) , Jan M Wiener (5) , Christoph Hölscher (6) , Ruth C Dalton (7) , Michael Hornberger (3) , Hugo J Spiers (2)

1 LS2N - Laboratoire des Sciences du Numérique de Nantes
2 UCL - University College of London [London]
3 UEA - University of East Anglia [Norwich]
4 McGill University = Université McGill [Montréal, Canada]
5 BU - Bournemouth University [Poole]
6 ETH Zürich - Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule - Swiss Federal Institute of Technology [Zürich]
7 University of Northumbria at Newcastle [United Kingdom]

Human spatial ability is modulated by a number of factors including age [1-3] and gender [4, 5]. While a few studies showed that culture influences cognitive strategies [6-13], the interaction between these factors has never been globally assessed as this requires testing millions of people of all ages across many different countries in the world. Since countries vary in their geographical and cultural properties, we predicted that these variations give rise to an organized spatial distribution of cognition at a planetary-wide scale. To test this hypothesis we developed a mobile-app-based cognitive task, measuring non-verbal spatial navigation ability in more than 2.5 million people, sampling populations in every nation state. We focused on spatial navigation due to its universal requirement across cultures. Using a clustering approach, we find that navigation ability is clustered into five distinct, yet geographically related, groups of countries. Specifically, the economic wealth of a nation was predictive of the average navigation ability of its inhabitants, and gender inequality was predictive of the size of performance difference between males and females. Thus, cognitive abilities, at least for spatial navigation, are clustered according to economic wealth and gender inequalities globally, which has significant implications for cross-cultural studies and multi-centre clinical trials using cognitive testing.

Mots clés: spatial cognition; cross-country analysis; crowdsourcing; gender differences; aging

Domaines: Neurosciences; Sciences cognitives

Antoine Coutrot, Ricardo Silva, Ed Manley, Will de Cothi, Saber Sami, et al.. Global Determinants of Navigation Ability. Current Biology - CB, 2018, 28 (17), pp.2861-2866. ⟨10.1016/j.cub.2018.06.009⟩. ⟨hal-01994888⟩