Study Shows Playing Video Games Improves Women’s Spatial Skills

Need a convincing argument to get your girlfriend, wife or daughter into gaming, or are you a girl gamer that needs extra leverage with your parents? A study at the University of Toronto has indicated that just a few hours of video game play can improve spatial awareness in females.

The research, to be published in the October issue of Psychological Science, suggests that a new approach involving action video games can be used to improve spatial skills. Women have been proven to test lower than men on spatial awareness based skills such as reading a map, driving a car, assembling a barbeque or learning advanced math. However the gap can be closed.

Our first experiment discovered a previously unknown sex difference in spatial attention,” said Jing Feng, a psychology doctoral student and lead author of the study. “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.”

Professor Ian Spence, director of the engineering psychology laboratory in the Department of Psychology, theorizes that playing action video games may actually trigger previously inactive genes that are crucial in developing neural pathways necessary for spatial attention.

“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.”

Professor Spence expresses hope that video game training could help to encourage more young women to enter the mathematical sciences and engineering which are still male dominated fields.

via University of Toronto