Spatial Abilities at High Altitude: Exploring the Role of Cultural Strategies and Hypoxia

Abstract

Background: Over the past couple of decades, the number of people of different cultures traveling to places of high altitude (HA) increased. At HA, a decline in cognitive abilities has been described, including spatial skills. However, it is still unknown whether people accustomed to hypobaric hypoxia are less susceptible to cognitive decline. Method: We aimed to determine if three ethnic groups would show any difference in the performance of spatial abilities. Italian trekkers (46.20 -15.83 years), Nepalese porters (30.33 -8.55 years), and lowlander and highlander Sherpas (30.33 -8.55 and 37.00 -16.51 years) were tested with a building photograph recognition, a map orienting, and a mental rotation task during a Himalayan expedition. Accuracy and response times were collected at low altitude (LA) and HA. Results: Nepalese performed the worst (photograph task: p = 0.015, g 2 p = 0.36; map task: p = 0.016, g 2 p = 0.36), but the difference was mitigated after correcting for length of schooling. Participants took more time to respond at LA than in HA condition (photograph task: 24.0 -15.3 seconds vs. 12.7 -6.3 seconds, p = 0.008, g 2 p = 0.57; map task: 12.5 -1.8 seconds vs. 7.8 -0.6 seconds, p = 0.038, g 2 p = 0.40). In the map task, participants performed with greater accuracy at LA (5.1 -0.4 vs. 4.4 -0.4 number of correct responses, p = 0.006, g 2 p = 0.59). Conclusions: Altitude hypoxia elicited impairments in cognitive spatial tasks. This may be due to the inability to acquire new unfamiliar patterns, and to the difficulty in managing a high cognitive workload. The ethnic differences were ascribed to schooling, even we consider the different system of reference usually exploited in each culture (egocentric: dependent, or allocentric: independent from the personal viewpoint), and that Westerners are more likely to focus on specific details of the scene. Further studies should investigate the diverse strategies to complete spatial tasks.

The practice of speleology: What is its relationship with spatial abilities?

“…Other studies have shown that outdoor-exploring activities, such as trekking (Bondi et al 2021) and orienteering (Meneghetti et al 2021a, b) or orienteering-like activities (Munion et al 2019), are related to small-and large-scale skills. In a study on orienteering, Meneghetti et al (2021a, b) asked expert and novice orienteers (who mostly practiced in a mountainous terrain) and controls (who engaged in no physical leisure activities) to study a city map and then perform a pointing task.…”

“…The results showed that they were better able to identify the targets correctly after the training, and males outperformed females. In another study, Bondi et al (2021) examined mountaintrekking experts' performance in visuospatial cognitive abilities in terms of large-scale reproduction (reporting the sequence of left or right turning points looking at a city map) and small-scale (mental rotation) tasks, other than visual (photo-recognition) task. The results showed that all trekking experts performed good in both small-and large-scale spatial tasks (range of average performance: 4-6.20; Max 7) in everyday conditions (low altitude).…”

“…Both groups of speleologists navigated in a karst region in the Pre-Alps areas of the Veneto and Lombardy (in northern Italy), where caves develop both horizontally and vertically (even to a depth of 1 km) and mainly differ for their years of speleology practice. The third group included people with many years of hiking experience in the mountains (that we have called expert mountaineers), a group that could be able to accomplish spatial tasks (Bondi et al 2021) and with abilities to use navigational maps in a mountainous environment (Murakoshi and Higashi 2015). The experts in speleology and mountaineers have the same number of years of practice in the Pre-Alpine environment, but the former was underground and the latter was aboveground.…”

What Simon “knows” about cultural differences: The influence of cultural orientation and traffic directionality on spatial compatibility effects

“…This work on differences at the interplay between time and space is important in that it shows how spatial cognition is modulated by long-term impact of different reference systems used for expressions of time (see also Gu et al, 2019). Thus, a diverse range of factors has been shown to influence performance on spatial tasks, including writing direction and time representation and even congruence of the altitudes of a person's place of residence and the place of testing (Bondi et al, 2021). Our novel finding of a dependency of the global Simon effect on traffic directionality shows that this factor may also be an important one.…”

“Where am I?” A snapshot of the developmental topographical disorientation among young Italian adults

“…The internal factors are of greater interest because they directly affect navigational competence; by consequence, it is possible to better intervene on them in order to plan prevention programs related to navigational disorders. The most important internal factors for navigation are: a) the cognitive predisposition to grasp certain environmental information rather than others [ 12 – 16 ]; b) gender [ 17 – 24 ]; c) age [ 25 – 30 ]; d) professional experience [ 31 – 36 ]; e) familiarity with the environment [ 37 – 40 ], reflecting the result of repeated exposure to a stimulus or an environment [ 41 , 42 ]; f) navigational strategies used during navigation [ 36 , 43 ]; g) psychiatric (e.g., spatial anxiety, depression, agoraphobia: [ 44 – 46 ]) and neurologic diseases (Alzheimer’s disease and brain lesions in the navigational brain network: [ 47 – 50 ]).…”