Video Game helps Scientists Researching Alzheimer's Disease

Alzheimer’s is an incurable disease that affects those in their elderly years and results in loss of many cognitive skills including memory and problem-solving skills. People with Alzheimer’s tend to show a loss of navigational skills before their rapid loss of memory. Keeping track of this may allow people to identify and begin treatment earlier. But to understand the difference in navigational abilities, it's necessary to develop a baseline of data: what are the expected navigational skills of a 75-year-old in America?

To gather this data, researchers proposed a video game that would test navigational skills and collect demographic data. They partnered with a subsidiary of T-Mobile to develop a video game called Sea Hero Quest, which has players navigate varying complexity maps to complete objectives. The researchers expected to collect data on 100,000 people from Western Europe, but due to an ad-campaign and a partnership with one of the largest youtubers in the world named PewDiePie, they were able to record user data from 4.3 million users from 38 countries around the world.

Aside from collecting baseline data, researchers who study memory loss need to understand alternate factors that influence navigation abilities, one of which is childhood environments. It was hypothesized that people who grew up in cities with organized grid-like layouts may develop less navigation skills compared to those who grow up in rural areas or cities with intricate structures. They studied data on 400,000 users from 38 countries to investigate the relationship between demographic area and navigation skills. There were three major findings; they found that people who grew up outside of cities outperform those who grew up in cities in navigation skills even when adjusted for differences in age, nationality, and gender. People from more intricate cities like those in Spain performed almost as well as those who grew up in rural cities. To address concerns that the increased performance by rural people was due to the games setting in nature, a similar study was conducted with fewer participants where they collected more background data including current living arrangements. Through this, they concluded that people’s current environment had little impact on their navigational skills, suggesting that prior experience accounted for their current abilities.

One explanation for the difference in cognitive abilities is that navigating complex environments creates new neurons in the hippocampus, a brain region responsible for memory. In addition, exploring more complicated layouts helps develop better navigational skills. This study is noteworthy not only for its creative use of video games for data collection, but also for its incredible range of user data.

This study emphasizes the impact our childhood experiences can have on our cognitive abilities throughout the lifetime. Of course, people's brains are malleable, and it is entirely possible to learn navigational skills later in life. In the future, researchers hope to build more games like Sea Hero Quest to create cognitive tests to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease earlier in its development.