Spatial Cognition Essay

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In the abstract of our report, the authors introduce the fact that men and women have different distribution of spatial attention, which means, there is a gender differences in spatial cognition. Surprisingly, this group of researches composed of Jing Feng, Ian Spence, and Jay Pratt from the University of Toronto has found that playing action video games reduce this gender difference in spatial cognition. In addition, after a training of 10 hours, all subjects including females did a remarkable improvement in special attention and mental rotation. Moreover, women benefited more than males. And logically, those who did not have the action game training did not show any improvement. Women should be more interested in the scientific fields because …show more content…

In our daily life, we notice that at a very early age of their childhood, men play more games than women. This may explain the future gender difference in spatial cognition. Playing action video games may also have a positive impact on spatial cognition; because, action video games players enhance their visual cognition, which is a great constituent of the spatial cognition. Unfortunately, action video games are not one of the first preferences of girls. Boys, on the other hand, are taking advantage from playing these games because they may be developing higher-level of spatial attention. But, is there any likely difference between males and females in poor-level spatial attentional processes and their consequences on greater-level spatial …show more content…

Two groups participated in the experience a control group trained with non-action games, a 3-D puzzle game. And an experimental group, mainly trained by “Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault”, like the games played by the players subjects in experiment one. The subjects were twenty undergraduate students from 18 to 32 years old, different from those who participated in the first experiment. They did not play any video games for four years. Six from them were males and the others were females. In this experiment, the UFOV task was used in addition to a “Mental Rotation Test (MRT)” to evaluate the level of spatial abilities. In this test, participants had to select which two of four pictures displayed on the right portrayed objects identical to the one exposed on the left. Groups of ten same gender were formed by matching the participants according to their pretest scores in UFOV task and MRT. In each pair, one member was assigned randomly to the action game group, and the other one was attributed to the non-action game group. After 10 hours video games training in an interval of five months, participants completed a UFOV task and MRT

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