Fig 1.
Task in real world (bottom row) vs virtual environment (top row).
(A-B) Wayfinding task in the video game: participants had to memorize a map and navigate as fast as possible toward an ordered set of goals. Participants played Sea Hero Quest on a tablet. (C) Path Integration task in the video game: participants had to navigate in a maze until they find a flare and shoot it back toward their starting position. (D) Wayfinding task in the real world. Identical as the virtual task, but takes place in the streets of (E) London and (F) Paris. All other maps are displayed in supporting S1–S4 Figs.
Fig 2.
Spatial ability at a wayfinding task in real world vs virtual environment.
(A) Correlation between the distance navigated in the video game and the normalized distance navigated in the real-world wayfinding task in London (skipped Pearson’s r = 0.46, p = 0.01) and (B) in Paris (skipped Pearson’s r = 0.57, p = 0.001). Real-world normalized distance is the distance travelled by participants divided by the number of goals they reached. Outliers have been determined with skipped-correlation. (C) Skipped correlation coefficients between the distance navigated in each video game level and the total normalized distance navigated in the real world. Video game levels are sorted by increasing difficulty according to Table 1. (D) Gender differences at the wayfinding task in the video game (right) and in the real world (left). Distances have been standardized (zscore) to allow a direct comparison between environments. Black dots represent individual data points. Error bars represent standard errors.
Table 1.
Difficulty of the virtual and real-world wayfinding task.
Left: Real-world wayfinding task. For each route, percentage of the goals reached by the participants in London (23 participants) and in Paris (26 participants) within the time limit. Right: Video game wayfinding task. For each level, percentage of participants who completed the level before the helping arrow appeared.
Table 2.
Difficulty of the virtual and real-world path integration task in Paris (30 participants) and in London (19 participants).
Left: Real-world path integration task. For each route, average of the absolute value of the error angle (M ± SE, in degree). Right: Video game path integration task. For each level, we show the percentage of correct answers (3 stars).
Fig 3.
Comparison with the large scale video game dataset.
Distance in the Video Game (level 11) of the French and British participants tested in the original Sea Hero Quest database (N = 78,724, blue histogram), see [13] for full data. The red dotted vertical lines represent the performance of the participants recorded in the current study.