Educational Games Research Blog~
Here’s an interesting comparison of the sexes insofar as
video gaming goes.
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.
Read more...
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"We don't stop playing because we grow old;
we grow old because we stop playing."
