Comment by smallnix
14 hours ago
Would love to see a study looking at people who spend significant time in video games that require spatial navigation.
That could even be a form of therapy after diagnosis (which seems to become easier with biomarkers).
Look at https://seaheroquest.com/papers this is a game I designed and developed that links spatial performance to population scale navigation changes across 4.3m people.
Vsauce did a video about how League of Legends can affect spatial navigation and the brain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RHsAUyFCAM It seemed a bit odd to me since LoL isn't especially navigation-heavy, but Michael from Vsauce later confirmed he was actually playing LoL (they just weren't allowed to name it or show it directly - https://www.reddit.com/r/vsauce/comments/7igkve/what_game_do...).
Hmm, never played LoL myself but is keeping track of were the opposing hero can be given were you last saw them a big part of the strategy?
That description is accurate, but that's more of an attention management problem then of a navigation problem. You have to infer information about opponent positioning based on partial information, while also moving your character with repeated clicks, each click requiring precision (and more of your attention). It's more like poker in real-time with timers than to remembering a whole city infrastructure or planning a full route.
If LoL trained you for ambulance work, the world would look something like: there are 5 hospitals, 3 patients, 15 roads; a hospital inspector goes from hospital to hospital, panicked hospital managers open that hospital for 5 hours after inspector is about to arrive; you have another ambulance friend that tells you from time to time info about last inspector location or how panicked the managers looked; infer open hospitals and inspector location such that your patient survives, while you also have to maintain a high Candy Crush score on your phone non-stop.