A study using the mobile video game Sea Hero Quest found that men, but not women, who reported shorter sleep durations tended to perform worse on wayfinding tasks in the game. The association disappeared when men who reported sleeping fewer than 6 or more than 9 hours per night were excluded from the analysis. The findings were published in Scientific Reports.
Sleep quality refers to how well a person sleeps. It encompasses aspects such as how long it takes to fall asleep, the amount of time spent in different sleep stages, the number of awakenings during a night, and how rested a person feels upon waking. Good sleep quality is crucial for maintaining physical health, mental health, and overall quality of life.
Sleep plays a vital role in repairing the body, strengthening the immune system, and regulating hormones that control appetite and growth. Sleep also helps to consolidate memories, process information, and maintain cognitive functions such as attention, learning, and problem-solving. Because of all this, poor sleep quality is linked to a variety of health issues, including heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and depression. People lacking sleep often show lower emotional stability, worse productivity, and worse ability to interact socially.
Study author Emre Yavuz and his colleagues noted that previous research had linked poor sleep quality to worse spatial navigation performance. They hypothesized that their study would find a similar association between sleep quality and spatial navigation performance. They also considered the possibility that the relationship between sleep duration and spatial navigation performance might follow an inverted U-shaped curve, suggesting that both very long and very short sleep durations could impair spatial navigation compared to a medium or normal sleep duration.
“Sleep has been shown to impact navigation ability. However, it remains unclear how different sleep-related variables may be independently associated with spatial navigation performance, and as to whether gender may play a role in these associations,” said Yavuz, a PhD student in cognitive neuroscience at University College London.
The study involved 766 adults living in the U.S., recruited through Prolific. Of these participants, 431 were women, and their average age was 27 years. Among them, 263 reported living in cities, while 503 lived outside of cities.
Participants responded to a series of self-report questions about their sleep habits and sleep quality. They also provided demographic data and information on the number of hours per week they spent playing video games. After completing the questionnaire, participants engaged in playing Sea Hero Quest.
Sea Hero Quest is a video game for mobile and tablet devices that requires participants to navigate through a three-dimensional world in a boat to search for sea creatures in order to photograph them. The environment consists of oceans, rivers and lakes. Study authors used it to assess participants’ wayfinding performance.
Results showed that females tended to sleep some minutes longer than males on average. Their average nap duration was 12 minutes longer. Women reported waking up a bit more often during the night than males and spending more time in bed. Females reported using alarms more often than males.
Individuals with less difficulty waking up, who felt less sleepy and with better sleep quality tended to perform better on wayfinding in the game. Males who reported shorted sleep durations tended to have worse wayfinding performance in the game. This was not the case with females. When men who reported sleeping for less than 6 or more than 9 hours per night were removed from the analysis, this association disappeared.
“Shorter self-reported sleep durations were significantly associated with worse wayfinding performance in men only,” Yavuz told PsyPost. “Other self-reported sleep variables showed non-significant trends of association with wayfinding performance. When removing non-typical sleepers (< 6 or > 9 h of sleep on a typical night), the significant association between sleep duration and spatial navigation performance in men was no longer present. These findings from U.S.-based participants suggest that a longer self-reported sleep duration may be an important contributor to successful navigation ability in men.”
Yavuz was particularly surprised by “the gender-specific association between sleep duration and navigation ability, given that although previous studies had shown an association between gender and cognitive function and between sleep and cognitive function, there were no previous studies showing a specific interaction between sleep and gender on navigation performance.”
But the study, like all research, includes some caveats.
“This study was cross-sectional and only revealed associations between variables rather than causation,” Yavuz noted. “Future intervention-based studies will need to investigate casual relationships between sleep-related parameters and navigation performance to determine whether there may be a cause-and-effect relationship between sleep-related parameters and navigation performance.:
“Further causal and intervention-based studies are needed to determine the association between both subjective and objective sleep-related measures and human navigation performance. This may pave the way towards developing sleep-based interventions that may reduce one’s risk of cognitive decline.”
The paper, “Shorter self‑reported sleep duration is associated with worse virtual spatial navigation performance in men,” was authored by Emre Yavuz, Christofer J. Gahnstrom, Sarah Goodroe, Antoine Coutrot, Michael Hornberger, Alpar S. Lazar, and Hugo J. Spiers.
