PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - A. Coutrot AU - S. Schmidt AU - L. Coutrot AU - J. Pittman AU - L. Hong AU - J. M. Wiener AU - C. Hölscher AU - R.C. Dalton AU - M. Hornberger AU - H. J. Spiers TI - Virtual navigation tested on a mobile app is predictive of real-world wayfinding navigation performance AID - 10.1101/305433 DP - 2018 Jan 01 TA - bioRxiv PG - 305433 4099 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/07/26/305433.short 4100 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/07/26/305433.full AB - Virtual reality environments presented on tablets and smartphones have potential to aid the early diagnosis of conditions such as Alzheimer’s dementia by quantifying impairments in navigation performance. However, it is unclear whether performance on mobile devices can predict navigation errors in the real world. We compared the performance of 60 participants (30 females, 18-35 years old) at wayfinding and path integration tasks designed in our mobile app ‘Sea Hero Quest’ with their performance at similar tasks in a real-world environment. We first performed this experiment in the streets of London (UK) and replicated it in Paris (France). In both cities, we found a significant correlation between virtual and real-world wayfinding performance and a male advantage in both environments, although smaller in the real world (Cohen’s d in the game = 0.89, in the real world = 0.59). Results in London and Paris were highly similar, and controlling for familiarity with video games did not change the results. The strength of the correlation between real world and virtual environment increased with the difficulty of the virtual wayfinding task, indicating that Sea Hero Quest does not merely capture video gaming skills. The fact that the Sea Hero Quest wayfinding task has real-world ecological validity constitutes a step toward controllable, sensitive, safe, low-cost, and easy to administer digital cognitive assessment of navigation ability.