Although the free consumer version was removed from app stores when the original project concluded, Sea Hero Quest has proven to be an invaluable tool for answering further questions in dementia research and other fields.

ARUK have once again partnered with game developers GLITCHERS, University College London, the University of East Anglia, and web developers BoldLight to develop a bespoke version of the game for researchers to create and fully manage prospective studies, as well as access data in real time from an existing study.

The new version of the app will be available for players with a participant code, generated by the Sea Hero Quest system according to the criteria and requirements of a specific project. Researchers will be able to invite a targeted group of participants to play Sea Hero Quest and generate data about their spatial navigation capabilities. For more information about setting up your own cohort and study, please visit: Wiki – Sea Hero Quest (alzheimersresearchuk.org)

Spatial cognition helps provide a general measure of cognitive ability that draws on multiple domains, for example perception, memory and executive functions. This is helpful for relating it to other measures – which something more specialised would not do, for example, purely vocabulary.

The game and the data it collects is a non-verbal measure, so it can be contrasted appropriately with other measures such as language attainment. In addition, spatial cognition is known to be highly diverse in the population, leading to a greater chance of detecting effects with any correlational analysis.

It is also a useful measure when comparing the data to animal studies, since this is main measure used in these studies and tests, for example spatial memory tasks. Thus, cognition provides some links to neuroscience as a discipline. We have also shown our measure of spatial cognition has good real-world validity (Please see Coutrot et al., 2019 PLoS one), and can predict real world behaviour.

Guidance on how to use the Researcher edition can be found on the ARUK Wiki page: Wiki – Sea Hero Quest (alzheimersresearchuk.org)

If you are still experiencing any access or technical issues when setting up your research project, or if you require support regarding the app, please complete this contact form: https://seaheroquest.alzheimersresearchuk.org/contact/ for assistance.

The ‘x’ and ‘y’ coordinates recorded are converted into a ‘distance travelled metric’. This has been used in current studies and has been very intuitive. Because we have data for 4 million people we can use this to profile people exactly for where they fall in the distribution. We are developing more sophisticated measures, but the distance works well as a measure. We have the scripts for analysis and it would be done in minutes for 10000 files.

We now have a data portal which Researchers can use to access the data from the global full set, of nearly 4 million people. To gain access, please visit: Sea Hero Quest powered by Deutsche Telekom (windows.net)

Spatial cognition would be a measure that makes sense for skills across all cultures, so useful for consideration in the field of Anthropology and Geography.

The links between spatial skills and STEM are now well documented, so for those interested in Education this measure is important to consider. For example we have a manuscript under review at Nature Human Behaviour where we report that the UK legislation change to more years in education can be shown (discontinuity regression) to have a causal impact on raising navigation ability.

The link between spatial skills and STEM also has long-term economic interest. This also has economic implications (particularly as spatial skills are very trainable) and so could feed into education policy recommendations. For example, engineering contributes 21.4% to the UK economic annual turnover, yet over £1.5billion losses are reported annually due to STEM skills shortages.

For economists’ spatial cognition as a measure may be useful since we have the broadest amount of data we are aware of from any cognitive test (covering 195 countries, 67 in detail). This means we have been able to compare economic differences. We found that performance of a population could be strongly predicted by GDP and the gap between men and women predicted by the World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Index (Please see Coutrot et al. 2018).