Sea Hero Quest in data

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Players built the benchmark

Research projects running

Papers published

Recent highlights

In no particular order, this is a list of recent highlights from published and preprint papers relating to Sea Hero Quest.

From Players to Participants: Citizen Science and Video Games to Understand Cognition

Syrine Salouhou, Edgar Dubourg, Maxwell Scott-Slade et al. 2026 (in review)

A timely review on why citizen science video games are becoming essential for cognitive research. The paper lays out the scale of the problem — 96% of psychology participants come from just 12% of the world — and shows how game-based projects like Sea Hero Quest (4M+ players across the globe) help close that gap. It also pulls in rare practical guidance from professional game developers on what it actually takes to build a game that's scientifically rigorous, ethically sound, and engaging enough to keep players coming back.

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Spatial navigation in preclinical Alzheimer's disease: A review

Syrine Salouhou, Victor Gilles, Remi Vallée et al. 2026 (preprint)

This review makes a strong case for what we've believed for years — that spatial navigation is one of the most sensitive early signals of Alzheimer's. The authors map how path integration and wayfinding rely on the exact brain circuits where AD pathology first appears, and show that navigation performance in cognitively unimpaired people correlates with plasma and CSF biomarkers like p-tau. A great synthesis of why scalable navigation testing matters for detecting at-risk individuals before symptoms emerge.

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Social determinants of cognitive aging trajectories across 39 countries

Victor Gilles, Syrine Salouhou, Rémi Vallée et al. 2024 (preprint)

The best descriptions come from the research community — like this short sentence we really liked from an upcoming paper that looks at 'Social determinants of cognitive aging trajectories across 39 countries'.

"Cognition is assessed using Sea Hero Quest, a spatial navigation video game that predicts spatial ability in the real world."

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Geometry of navigation identifies genetic-risk and clinical Alzheimer's disease

Uzu Lim et al. 2024 (preprint)

We love this pre-print by Uzu Lim because it looks at alternative performance metrics in the existing normative benchmark. In our eyes, it's a really exciting analysis of some additional ways to determine performance from things like path curvature and boundary effects in conjunction with Duration and Length. One to watch!

Read the paper

Papers

Year	Paper	Journal	Author(s)
2026	Determinants of individual navigation ability	Nature Reviews Psychology	Emre Yavuz & Hugo J. Spiers
2025	Separable cognitive and motor decline tracked across adult life-span for goal-directed navigation.	iScience	Gian Luca Lancia, Marco D'Alessandro, Mattia Eluchans. et al.
2025	Education Is Positively and Causally Linked With Spatial Navigation Ability Across the Lifespan	Open Mind	Antoine Coutrot, Rogier A Kievit, Stuart J Ritchie et al.
2024	Shorter self-reported sleep duration is associated with worse virtual spatial navigation performance in men.	Scientific Reports	Yavuz, E., Gahnstrom, C.J., Goodroe, S. et al.
2024	Spatial Orientation Assessment in the Elderly: A Comprehensive Review of Current Tests	Brain Sciences	Panagiota Tragantzopoulou & Vaitsa Giannouli
2024	Lost in space(s): Multimodal neuroimaging of disorientation along the Alzheimer's disease continuum	Human Brain Mapping	Peters-Founshtein, G., Gazit, L., Naveh, T. et al.
2024	Individuals learning to drive solo before age 18 have superior spatial navigation ability compared with those who learn later	Spatial Cognition & Computation	Yavuz, E., Manley, E., Gahnstrom, C. et al.
2024	Video gaming, but not reliance on GPS, is associated with spatial navigation performance	Journal of Environmental Psychology	Yavuz, E., Chuanxiuyue He, Gahnstrom, C. et al.
2024	Combining patient-lesion and big data approaches to reveal hippocampal contributions to spatial memory and navigation.	iScience	Pishdadian, S., Coutrot, A., Webber, L. et al.
2024	Using games to understand the mind	Nature Human Behaviour	Allen, K., Brändle, F., Botvinick, M. et al.
2024	The relationship between object-based spatial ability and virtual navigation performance	PLoS ONE	Garg, T., Velasco, P. F., Patai, Z. E. et al.
2024	Improving microbial phylogeny with citizen science within a mass-market video game	Nature Biotechnology	Sarrazin-Gendron, R., Gheidari, P. G., Butyaev, A. et al.
2023	Wayfinding and path integration deficits detected using a virtual reality mobile app in patients with traumatic brain injury	PLoS ONE	Seton, C., Coutrot, A., Hornberger, M. et al.
2023	Cultural determinants of the gap between self-estimated navigation ability and wayfinding performance: evidence from 46 countries	Scientific Reports	Walkowiak, S., Coutrot, A., Hegarty, M. et al.
2023	Landmark-dependent Navigation Strategy Declines across the Human Life-Span: Evidence from Over 37,000 Participants	Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience	West, G., Patai, Z. E., Coutrot, A. et al.
2022	Reported sleep duration reveals segmentation of the adult life-course into three phases	Nature Communications	Coutrot, A., Lazar, A. S., Richards, M. et al.
2022	Predicting real world spatial disorientation in Alzheimer's disease patients using virtual reality navigation tests	Scientific Reports	Puthusseryppady, V., Morrissey, S., Spiers, H. J. et al.
2022	Developments in scalable strategies for detecting early markers of cognitive decline	Translational Psychiatry	Whelan, R., Barbey, F. M., Cominetti, M. R. et al.
2022	Entropy of city street networks linked to future spatial navigation ability	Nature	Coutrot, A., Manley, E., Goodroe, S. et al.
2022	Exosomatic Route Choice in Navigation: Evidence from video game player data	Proceedings of the 13th Space Syntax Symposium	McElhinney, S., Zisch, F., Hornsberger, M. et al.
2022	How the environment shapes our ability to navigate	Clinical and Translational Medicine	Spiers, H. J., Coutrot, A., & Hornberger, M.
2021	Explaining World-Wide Variation in Navigation Ability from Millions of People: Citizen Science Project Sea Hero Quest	Topics in Cognitive Science	Spiers, H. J., Coutrot, A., & Hornberger, M.
2021	Capturing and explaining trajectory singularities using composite signal neural networks	28th European Signal Processing Conference	Dubois, H., Le Callet, P., Hornberger, M. et al.
2021	Computer models of saliency alone fail to predict subjective visual attention to landmarks during observed navigation	Spatial Cognition & Computation	Yesiltepe, D., Ozbil Torun, A., Coutrot, A. et al.
2021	Memory precision of object-location binding is unimpaired in APOE ε4-carriers with spatial navigation deficits	Brain Communications	Gellerson, H. M., Coughlan, G., Hornberger, M. et al.
2020	Navigation ability before and after menopause	Alzheimer's & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer's association	Chapin, B.A., Khondoker, M., Coughlan, G. et al.
2020	Test-retest reliability of spatial navigation in adults at-risk of Alzheimer's disease	PLoS ONE	Coughlan, G., Puthusseryppady, V., Lowry, E. et al.
2020	Cities have a negative impact on navigation ability: evidence from 38 countries	Nature	Coutrot, A., Manley, E., Yesiltepe, D. et al.
2019	Toward personalized cognitive diagnostics of at-genetic-risk Alzheimer's disease	PNAS	Coughlan, G., Coutrot, A., Khondoker, M. et al.
2019	Virtual navigation tested on a mobile app is predictive of real-world wayfinding navigation performance	PLoS ONE	Coutrot, A., Schmidt, S., Coutrot, L. et al.
2018	Global determinants of navigation ability	Current Biology	Coutrot, A., Silva, R., Manley, E. et al.