GLITCHERS
@glitchers.bsky.social
Edinburgh based game studio working at the intersection of gaming and science 🧠 glitchers.com Sign up to the waitlist ⚓ seaheroquest.com
So happy to also be a part of building this incredible platform with @uclbrainscience.bsky.social 👏
UCL Faculty of Brain Sciences@uclbrainscience.bsky.social · last mo.Nearly 1 million people in the UK are living with dementia. Researchers at @uclpsychiatry.bsky.social are exploring innovative ways to reduce risk, using personalised digital interventions to support healthier lifestyles and better brain health. #WorldAlzheimersMonth ➡️ www.ucl.ac.uk/brain-scienc...
Navigation is "rarely assessed" in clinical settings, according to this new preprint from first author Sophia Rekers. They found 41% of NMDAR encephalitis patients passed their memory tests but scored below normal on navigation. Sea Hero Quest was one of the tasks ⚓ www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Cool read on how spatial navigation may protect against Alzheimer's 👏 Sea Hero Quest lets you track your own navigation skills while contributing data to global dementia research. Running a private beta (ethics approved by St Andrews), comment or DM us to join! theconversation.com/taxi-drivers...
Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer’s – how complex mental maps and spatial reasoning protect your brain
Working with and living in spatially complex environments may help delay cognitive decline, though more research is needed.
theconversation.com
Why we do, what we do, GLITCHERS story and what we're doing next: www.youtube.com/watch?v=id2l...
The power of games talk!
YouTube video by Maxwell Scott-Slade
youtube.com
These videos make us laugh, do love this screenshot though. RESEARCHERS x GLITCHERS = 🏅 www.youtube.com/shorts/WXau0...
🚨 New publication in collab with Shayna Rosenbaum's lab: "Aphantasia is associated with spatial memory and navigation difficulties in complex virtual environments" Our test SeaHeroQuest shows a correlation between nav performance and mental imagery (VVIQ) www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Aphantasia is associated with spatial memory and navigation difficulties in complex virtual environments in this new journal, using Sea Hero Quest: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... First author Adrienne Li ⭐
Aphantasia is associated with spatial memory and navigation difficulties in complex virtual environments
Visual imagery features centrally in many theories of spatial navigation, yet its contribution to wayfinding is unclear. Sea Hero Quest (SHQ), a navig…
sciencedirect.com
Heres our article from 2022 on sleep and cognition: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Reported sleep duration reveals segmentation of the adult life-course into three phases - Nature Communications
Sleep varies within and between individuals. Here, using self-reported sleep duration from a large sample of participants across 63 countries, the authors show three phases in the adult human life-cou...
nature.com
Massive study in @nature.com, converges with our past study of 750,000 people (Sea hero quest) to show u-shape curves for the impact of sleep. We studied cognition, here its disease impact: Sleep chart of biological ageing clocks in middle and late life www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Sleep chart of biological ageing clocks in middle and late life - Nature
A cross-organ, multi-omics U-shaped relationship between sleep duration and biological ageing clocks highlights the potential of sleep optimization to promote healthy ageing, lower disease risk and ex...
nature.com
⚠️New review on video games for cognitive citizen science! "From Players to Participants: Citizen Science and Video Games to Understand Cognition" arxiv.org/abs/2604.24321
My favourite example of the benefits of using video games in cognitive science:
Max from @glitchers.bsky.social (creator of Sea Hero Quest) and @edgardubourg.bsky.social (working at the interface between game dev and scientists) provide insights into creating successful video games for scientific research and explain why this approach is still so rare.
⚠️New review straight out of the oven! "Spatial navigation in preclinical Alzheimer's disease: A review" arxiv.org/abs/2603.23082 We focus on spatial navigation as a sensitive cognitive marker in preclinical AD, compiling evidence from cognitively unimpaired individuals with positive AD biomarkers.
New lab preprint! Human Navigation Behaviour and Brain Dynamics in Real-world Contexts with co-authors: @pfvelasco.bsky.social and @antoinecoutrot.bsky.social arxiv.org/pdf/2603.11347
Thanks to @cnn.com for covering our research on London taxi drivers in their new, rather chatty, format 'Creators' Taxi driver Tom Scullion is the star of this piece. He trains others to learn the knowledge an has so many insights into that process. #neuroskyence www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7df...
Great article from @antoinecoutrot.bsky.social which mentions Sea Hero Quest. "Video games are no longer just a pastime. They are becoming a mirror of the brain, capable of stimulating it, treating it, and helping us better understand it"
Jeux vidéo et cerveau : quand le virtuel stimule nos capacités cognitives
Quels effets les jeux vidéo ont sur le cerveau ? Entre stimulation visuelle et sonore et outils de recherches scientifiques, ces loisirs sont de vrais trésors pour nos capacités cognitives.
20minutes.fr
We took Sea Hero Quest to two conferences one month apart. @techcrunch.com Disrupt & @unity.com Unite. One a focused game development conference and another big tech..
A Tale of Two Conferences
We compare TechCrunch Disrupt and Unity Unite conferences with the same product demo, 1 month apart. Here's what we learned ...
glitchers.com
You can sign up for the early access to the new Sea Hero Quest: seaheroquest.com
Sea Hero Quest - Take Control of Your Brain Health
Join the world's largest study on spatial navigation and early Alzheimer's detection. Test your cognitive performance against 4.3 million players worldwide and contribute to groundbreaking research.
seaheroquest.com
Nicolas Clairis@nclairis.bsky.social · last yr.Just discovered (a bit late I admit) this fascinating talk from @hugospiers.bsky.social Now I really want to play that SeaHeroQuest game! Hope it gets available again soon!
A wild AI hallucination just made Sea Hero Quest blow up in Korea. Now I just want to know… what on earth are people asking ChatGPT to get this?
Sea Hero Quest Goes Viral in South Korea
Sea Hero Quest went viral in South Korea with over 1.2 million views, adding a huge wave of new people to our waitlist.
glitchers.com
Can’t believe we’re in @sifted.eu Such a joy to represent Scotland’s gaming scene in Japan and to share Sea Hero Quest with Japan from our stand at the World Expo. Thanks to @techscaler.bsky.social for making it happen. Read more below:
Scottish startups up their game in Japan
CodeBase extended its successful Techscaler programme to Japan earlier this year, taking a cohort of eight Scottish gaming startups there.
sifted.eu
Buzzing to see Sea Hero Quest being featured in the upcoming book Hacking Humanity by @laralewington.bsky.social which has sparked some coverage over the past few days. Big thanks to @hugospiers.bsky.social 🧠 The waitlist for the latest version is growing fast - sign up here: seaheroquest.com
If you think the future of cognitive health is doing the same old stuff… scroll on. 💤 We’re building a lab in your pocket - powered by games, built with science - shoutout to our amazing partners @hugospiers.bsky.social, @antoinecoutrot.bsky.social + crew! 🧠🎮 GO ON PUT A LAB IN YOUR POCKET:
PUT A LAB IN YOUR POCKET — GLITCHERS - Games for Good
When we launched Sea Hero Quest , scientists had no idea what healthy navigation performance looked like. It was so important to understand, because it’s one of the first things to decline in Alzhei...
glitchers.com
Could Sea Hero Quest be used as part of a strategy for detecting early markers of cognitive decline? 🧠 Translational Psychiatry article from '22 - Robert Whelan, Florentine M. Barbey, Marcia R. Cominetti, Claire M. Gillan & Anna M. Rosická
Developments in scalable strategies for detecting early markers of cognitive decline - Translational Psychiatry
Translational Psychiatry - Developments in scalable strategies for detecting early markers of cognitive decline
nature.com
Yesterday's post on our @pnas.org study of London taxi drivers. Yellow lines = imagined journeys, described street-by-street. Some were 30 streets, which if using a tree-search over 26,000 possible states would take a very very long time. Daniel McNamee's models show how they compress this problem:
Hugo Spiers@hugospiers.bsky.social · 2y ago🚨 new publication from our lab in @pnas.org ! "Expert navigators deploy rational complexity–based decision precaching for large-scale real-world planning" Entropy of streets & successor representations explain planning speed Colab wth Daniel McNamee at Champalimaud www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
🚨 New fMRI preprint from our lab 🚨 "Brain dynamics during architectural experience: prefrontal and hippocampal regions track aesthetics and spatial complexity" Led by Lara Gregorians with co-authors, Zita Patai, Pablo Fernandez Velasco & Fiona Zisch. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #neuroskyence
⚓ Can you believe it's been almost 9 years since Sea Hero Quest first set sail? In 2025, we’re embarking on an exciting chapter in the SHQ universe as we move closer to launching the clinical version. Here’s more about what’s ahead and how you can get involved www.glitchers.com/blog/longitu... 🧠
glitchers.com
If you are interested in using Sea Hero Quest in a clinical setting, please read more on our website & get in touch. New features including longitudinal testing and visible outcome measures on the dashboard are coming soon:
GLITCHERS: Early Intervention for Alzheimer's dementia
Navigation performance is a key early indicator in Alzheimer’s dementia. Sea Hero Quest by GLITCHERS can accurately measure navigation performance throughout life, making it an invaluable assessment t...
glitchers.com
🧠 ⚓ If you are a researcher with ethics and you'd like to try a spatial navigation test with a 4.3 million data benchmark - please register to use Sea Hero Quest here: dash.seahero.quest
