“…We did not find a significant correlation between level difficulty and handedness effect size (Pearson's correlation r = 0.02, p = 0.90, figure 4 b ). As in [56], we used the difference between the median trajectory length and the shortest trajectory length (better optimized) as a proxy for the level difficulty: difficulty = (median(TL) − min(TL))/min(TL), with TL a vector containing the trajectory lengths of all participants at a given level (figure 5). Figure 5( a ) Effect of handedness (Hedges' g = −0.01) and gender (Hedges' g = 0.11) on visuomotor skills.…”
There is an active debate concerning the association of handedness and spatial ability. Past studies used small sample sizes. Determining the effect of handedness on spatial ability requires a large, cross-cultural sample of participants and a navigation task with real-world validity. Here, we overcome these challenges via the mobile app Sea Hero Quest. We analysed the navigation performance from 422 772 participants from 41 countries and found no reliable evidence for any difference in spatial ability between left- and right-handers across all countries. A small but growing gap in performance appears for participants over 64 years old, with left-handers outperforming right-handers. Further analysis, however, suggests that this gap is most likely due to selection bias. Overall, our study clarifies the factors associated with spatial ability and shows that left-handedness is not associated with either a benefit or a deficit in spatial ability.
“…We did not find a significant correlation between level difficulty and handedness effect size (Pearson's correlation r = 0.02, p = 0.90, figure 4 b ). As in [56], we used the difference between the median trajectory length and the shortest trajectory length (better optimized) as a proxy for the level difficulty: difficulty = (median(TL) − min(TL))/min(TL), with TL a vector containing the trajectory lengths of all participants at a given level (figure 5). Figure 5( a ) Effect of handedness (Hedges' g = −0.01) and gender (Hedges' g = 0.11) on visuomotor skills.…”
There is an active debate concerning the association of handedness and spatial ability. Past studies used small sample sizes. Determining the effect of handedness on spatial ability requires a large, cross-cultural sample of participants and a navigation task with real-world validity. Here, we overcome these challenges via the mobile app Sea Hero Quest. We analysed the navigation performance from 422 772 participants from 41 countries and found no reliable evidence for any difference in spatial ability between left- and right-handers across all countries. A small but growing gap in performance appears for participants over 64 years old, with left-handers outperforming right-handers. Further analysis, however, suggests that this gap is most likely due to selection bias. Overall, our study clarifies the factors associated with spatial ability and shows that left-handedness is not associated with either a benefit or a deficit in spatial ability.
“…There is room, however, for further spatial analysis of the environment under study. Space syntax, for instance, could provide vital insight into the role of major roads and street network properties in route planning (Peponis et al, 1990; Hölscher et al, 2006; Javadi et al, 2017; Yesiltepe et al, 2023). The current approach did not allow for this because most spatial network analytics use an approach that segregates entire streets into several clusters and then attributes spatial measures to each cluster, rather than to an entire street and their corresponding response times.…”
Humans show an impressive ability to plan over complex situations and environments. A classic approach to explaining such planning has been tree-search algorithms which search through alternative state sequences for the most efficient path through states. However, this approach fails when the number of states is large due to the time to compute all possible sequences. Hierarchical route planning has been proposed as an alternative, offering a computationally efficient mechanism in which the representation of the environment is segregated into clusters. Current evidence for hierarchical planning comes from experimentally created environments which have clearly defined boundaries and far fewer states than the real-world. To test for real-world hierarchical planning we exploited the capacity of London licensed taxi drivers to use their memory to construct a street by street plan across London, UK (>26,000 streets). The time to recall each successive street name was treated as the response time, with a rapid average of 1.8 seconds between each street. In support of hierarchical planning we find that the clustered structure of London’s regions impacts the response times, with minimal impact of the distance across the street network (as would be predicted by tree-search). We also find that changing direction during the plan (e.g. turning left or right) is associated with delayed response times. Thus, our results provide real-world evidence for how humans structure planning over a very large number of states, and give a measure of human expertise in planning.
“…We did not find a significant correlation between level difficulty and handedness effect size (Pearson's correlation r = 0.02, p = 0.90, see Figure 4b). As in (Yesiltepe et al, 2022), we used the difference between the median trajectory length and the shortest trajectory length (better optimised) as a proxy for the level difficulty: Difficulty = (median(TL)-min(TL))/min(TL), with TL a vector containing the trajectory lengths of all participants at a given level.…”
There is an active debate concerning the association of handedness and spatial ability. Past studies used small sample sizes within a single country. Determining the effect of handedness on spatial ability requires a large, cross-cultural sample of participants, and a navigation task with real-world validity. Here, we overcome these challenges via the mobile app Sea Hero Quest. We analysed the navigation performance from 422,772 participants from 41 countries and found no reliable evidence for any difference in spatial ability between left- and right-handers across all countries. Using 749,037 participants from the larger sample, we replicate previous findings that age, gender, and country of residence have an impact on the prevalence of left-handedness, and found an effect of education on left-handedness prevalence in China, Indonesia, India, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Our study clarifies the factors associated with spatial ability and outlines new ways in which cultural patterns influence handedness.
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