Study Shows Playing Video Games Improves Women's Spatial Skills

Published: October 3, 2007, 1:15 pm

Tags: gamer life, games, females, spatial awareness, study, university of toronto, women

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.

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