Study proves that people who were raised in rural areas have a better sense of direction than city dwellers

A player navigates a boat in Sea Hero Quest

"People who grew up in the country have a better sense of direction and navigational skills than those raised in cities, a study has found," Agence France-Presse reports. This is something many rural people have long believed about urbanites; now we have proof.

"To find out how childhood environment influences navigation ability, scientists looked at how almost 400,000 people from 38 countries played a mobile video game designed for neuroscience research," AFP reports.

According to the study, which was published in Nature, players of the Sea Hero Quest game navigated a boat to find checkpoints on a map. The game was created in 2016 to study Alzheimer's disease, but has since been played by nearly 4 million people, AFP reports.

"We found that growing up outside cities appears to be good for the development of navigational abilities, and this seems to be influenced by the lack of complexity of many street networks in cities," lead researcher Hugo Spiers of University College London told AFP.

Co-lead author Antoine Coutrot of France's University of Lyon noted that people from cities with complicated layouts such as Paris and Prague fared much better than those from grid-based cities like Chicago: "Growing up somewhere with a more complex layout of roads or paths might help with navigational skills as it requires keeping track of direction when you’re more likely to be making multiple turns at different angles, while you might also need to remember more streets and landmarks for each journey."

That has implications in the United States, where most of the landscape is overlaid with rectangular grids, but not most of the Eastern U.S. -- except the states north of the Ohio River that were part of the Northwest Territory, governed by the Northwest Ordinance, which divided the land into grids of townships, a system used as Americans migrated west. Next time you fly over the Ohio, notice the difference in how the landscape is laid out. Here's a Google map example:

The researchers also developed and tested users on a new game called City Hero Quest to see how well rural and urban people navigated in cities. "People raised in cities did manage better in grid street plans than those who grew up in the country – but the difference was nowhere near as stark as the other way around," AFP reports. Coutrot noted that adult urbanites can improve their sense of direction if they work at it, but said it's much easier when one is young.