Study Shows Videogames Offer Spatial Skills Improvement for Women

Here’s an interesting comparison of the sexes insofar as video gaming goes. Doctoral student Jing Feng at U. Toronto led a study finding that action videogames can improve spatial skills for women. Men’s skills improved too, but women in the study started with lower spatial skills than men.

Gaming Today quoted Jing Feng from the press release:

“On average, women are not quite as good at rapidly switching attention among different objects and this may be one reason why women do not do as well on spatial tasks. But more important than finding that difference, our second experiment showed that both men and women can improve their spatial skills by playing a video game and that the women catch up to the men,” Feng added. “Moreover, the improved performance of both sexes was maintained when we assessed them again after five months.”

Dr. Ian Spence, director of the engineering psychology lab at Toronto, added this neat quote: “Clearly, something dramatic is happening in the brain when we see marked improvements in spatial skills after only 10 hours of game playing and these improvements are maintained for many months.”

This study is already generating buzz in academia. Here is a link to Dr. Deric Bounds’ (U. Wisconsin) MindBlog. Alas, the full text of the article is a $29 download from Blackwell Publishing. Fortunately, Dr. Bounds has graciously linked to a PDF of the article that is freely available. If Dr. Bounds’ link gets taken down, readers can still access the abstract:

We demonstrate a previously unknown gender difference in the distribution of spatial attention, a basic capacity that supports higher-level spatial cognition. More remarkably, we found that playing an action video game can virtually eliminate this gender difference in spatial attention and simultaneously decrease the gender disparity in mental rotation ability, a higher-level process in spatial cognition. After only 10 hr of training with an action video game, subjects realized substantial gains in both spatial attention and mental rotation, with women benefiting more than men. Control subjects who played a non-action game showed no improvement. Given that superior spatial skills are important in the mathematical and engineering sciences, these findings have practical implications for attracting men and women to these fields.

And finally, here’s the importance of the study, as summed up in the final paragraph of the paper:

Superior spatial ability is related to employment in engineering and science (McGee, 1979), and females, who typically score lower than males on tests of spatial skills, are underrepresented in these fields, with worldwide participation rates as low as one in five. Given that our first experiment and others (e.g., Greenfield & Cocking, 1996; McGillicuddy-De Lisi & De Lisi, 2002) have shown that particular cognitive capacities are associated with educational and career choices, training with appropriately designed action video games could play a significant role as part of a larger strategy designed to interest women in science and engineering careers (Quaiser-Pohl et al., 2006). Non-video-game players in our study realized large gains after only 10 hr of training; we can only imagine the benefits that might be realized after weeks, months, or even years of action-video-gaming experience.

To wit: there is much concern regarding the low numbers of women in STEM fields. This study purports to touch on possible causes for the low numbers, and offers appropriate videogames as a solution. The authors have made an important contribution to the research in this area.

References
Feng, J., Spence, I., & Pratt, J. (2007, October). Playing an action video game reduces gender differences in spatial cognition. Psychological Science 18(10), 850–855.

Study shows playing video games improves women’s spatial skills. (2007, October 3). Gaming Today. [Online]. Available: http://news.filefront.com/study-shows-playing-
video-games-improves-womens-spatial-skills/