Abstract
Human spatial ability is modulated by a number of factors, including age [1-3] and gender [4, 5]. Although 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 and 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-center clinical trials using cognitive testing.
Highlights
To quantify spatial abilities, we defined ‘‘overall performance corrected’’ (OPcorr), a metric that captures different aspects of navigation abilities while correcting for video-gaming skills
Together, wayfinding and path integration capture a wide range of the abilities and processes that are required for everyday successful navigation. 2,512,123 people between 18 and 99 years old from all 195 countries in the world downloaded and played the game. 57.6% of the participants provided demographics of their age, gender, and nationality (Figure S1)
To provide a reliable estimate of spatial navigation ability, we examined the data only from those subjects who had completed a minimum of nine levels of the game
Summary
Human spatial ability is modulated by a number of factors, including age [1,2,3] and gender [4, 5]. 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 and sampling populations in every nation state. 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-center clinical trials using cognitive testing
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