First-person shooters narrow the gender gap in spatial abilities

Jing Feng, Ian Spence, and Jay Pratt, the University of Toronto authors of an article in the October 2007 issue of psychological science, provide evidence of improvement in both a test of spatial attention and a mental rotation task. Female players showed more improvement than male players, however, that improvement did not completely eliminate the male gender bias in these tasks.

Participants pretested with the useful-field-of-view task, shown by Edwards et al. (2005) to be a valid and reliable measure of spatial attention. Also, they did a mental rotation task to assess what the authors distinguish as higher level spatial cognition. Then the participants play 10 hours of either Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault (a first-person shooter) or Ballance, a game the authors predicted would not affect spatial attention or spatial cognition abilities. Next the participants did the two psychological tasks again in order to see whether or not they improved. As predicted females and males both improved their spatial attention and cognition skills, but only in the group that played the first-person shooter.

In general I liked the incorporation of video games as a way to study cognitive abilities instead of just video game violence and aggression. However, I felt a little frustration myself with the many unanswered questions these experiments only seemed to highlight. Why are they (and others) finding gender biases in spatial abilities anyway, because most guys play first-person shooters?!? No. So what is it? Also, what is the link between spatial attention and mental rotation, and how are they improved? It seems that the authors think low-level attentional processes are improving and that leads to an improvement in high-level cognitive processes. But how does that work, and why in that direction?

Then I wondered what it was about the games that affected performance on both of the psychological tasks. For the game Ballance it looks like the player must pay attention to spatial locations and plan where to roll the ball to next. Why isn't that enough to aid spatial attention abilities? What is it about first-person shooters? Is Medal of Honor the only first-person shooter that works, or does Gears of War and Halo 3 narrow the gender gap as well? One factor may be the social aspects of Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault. From the videos on the games website (link above) it shows the player commanding a small group of soldiers toward a goal. That is pretty different from a first-person shooter like Resident Evil 4, in which the player pretty much takes care of business on one's own.

So, while it is good that an article can generate a lot of interest and more questions, it is also nice to feel like a bit of a handle on the phenomenon has been provided. This article did not answer many questions that I had, and the framing concerning who goes into science or arts just was not very interesting to me.