Coutrot Antoine, Kievit Rogier A, Ritchie Stuart J, Manley Ed, Wiener Jan M, Hölscher Christof, Dalton Ruth C, Hornberger Michael, Spiers Hugo J
CNRS, INSA Lyon, Universite Claude Bernard Lyon 1, LIRIS, UMR 5205, Villeurbanne, France.
Cognitive Neuroscience Department, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior, Radboud University Medical Center, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Open Mind (Camb). 2025 Jul 26;9:926-939. doi: 10.1162/opmi.a.13. eCollection 2025.
There is consistent evidence for a positive association between education and a wide range of cognitive abilities. In particular, spatial abilities have been shown to be strongly related to academic achievement. However, studying this association is complex as both education and spatial abilities are modulated by multivariate sociodemographic factors, likely to vary across countries. Most previous studies relied on small sample sizes or were restricted to a limited number of countries, thus were unable to control for these covariates. To overcome these limitations, we used a spatial navigation task embedded in a mobile video game. We quantified the wayfinding ability of 397,162 people across 38 countries and showed that on average, education level was positively associated with wayfinding ability. This difference was stronger in older participants and increased with task difficulty. However, the effect of education was different across countries, from near-zero and non-significant in India (Bayes' factor = 0.08, Hedge's = -0.03, 95% CI = [-0.15, 0.08]), to modest and significant in Romania (Bayes' factor = 345.44, Hedge's = 0.15, 95% CI = [0.08, 0.22]). We did not find any relationship between the education effect size of countries and economic indicators such as GDP per capita. Using the 1972 reform increasing the minimum school leaving age in the UK as a natural experiment, we used a regression discontinuity design to show that education has a causal effect on wayfinding ability.
有一致的证据表明教育与广泛的认知能力之间存在正相关。特别是，空间能力已被证明与学业成绩密切相关。然而，研究这种关联很复杂，因为教育和空间能力都受到多变量社会人口因素的调节，而这些因素可能因国家而异。以前的大多数研究样本量较小或仅限于少数几个国家，因此无法控制这些协变量。为了克服这些局限性，我们使用了一款手机视频游戏中嵌入的空间导航任务。我们对38个国家的397,162人的寻路能力进行了量化，结果表明，平均而言，教育水平与寻路能力呈正相关。这种差异在年龄较大的参与者中更为明显，并且随着任务难度的增加而增大。然而，教育的影响在不同国家有所不同，在印度几乎为零且不显著（贝叶斯因子 = 0.08，赫奇斯效应量 = -0.03，95%置信区间 = [-0.15, 0.08]），在罗马尼亚则适度且显著（贝叶斯因子 = 345.44，赫奇斯效应量 = 0.15，95%置信区间 = [0.08, 0.22]）。我们没有发现国家的教育效应量与人均国内生产总值等经济指标之间存在任何关系。利用1972年英国提高最低离校年龄的改革作为一项自然实验，我们采用回归断点设计来表明教育对寻路能力有因果效应。
