Ants use a built in 'sat-nav' to always know where they're going - even when travelling backwards
As sat-navs and GPS technology has become commercially available, there have been calls for The Knowledge to be scrapped. However, a new study claims that when using automated systems, the areas of the brain used to think of different routes are 'switched-off'.
"Entering a junction such as Seven Dials in London, where seven streets meet, would enhance activity in the hippocampus, whereas a dead-end would drive down its activity," Hugo Spiers from UCL's experimental psychology group and a senior author on the paper said in a statement.
"When we have technology telling us which way to go, these parts of the brain simply don't respond to the street network. In that sense, our brain has switched off its interest in the streets around us."
During the work – which was a statistically small study – the team got 24 participants to learn the layout of a part of Soho. Before they were selected, the participants were tested to ensure they had limited knowledge of Soho, and had directional skills.
The test subjects were shown a photo of a destination in Soho and asked to navigate through a digital reconstruction of London's streets to get there in the shortest route. When navigating the streets, those in the study were shown an image of each junction they would come to and asked to pick the correct direction.
As those in the test were getting lost in London's maze-like streets, the researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to analyse brain activity. When those taking part in the test navigated manually, their hippocampus and prefrontal cortex spiked in activity as a new street was entered. The brain activity was increased when the number of options to choose from increased.
Fascinating 'maps' reveal the secret journeys made by animals, from ants to elephants
Whereas, when people followed instructions from sat-navs, no extra brain activity occurred.
To control the study, the participants were shown a number of videos where they did not have to make decisions and their brain activity was similarly recorded.
As well as analysing the decisions made as people navigated their way through streets, the research looked at the space syntax in cities. This studies, among other things, the number of streets that connect to each other.
Understanding how cities and streets interconnect could help architects to design the built environment in the future. "Our new findings allow us to look at the layout of a city or building and consider how the memory systems of the brain may likely react," Spiers said.
"For example, we could look at the layouts of care homes and hospitals to identify areas that might be particularly challenging for people with dementia and help to make them easier to navigate."