Daming improves womens spatial skills?

[Wolf]

Action Games Improve Women’s Spatial Abilities, Says New Study

While research has consistently shown that the male brain has advantages in spatial skills like geometry, interpreting technical drawings and reading maps, a new study says that playing action-oriented video games can equalize the sexes in that regard.

Researchers at the University of Toronto report they have observed a potential key component in the brains’ ability to process spatial information. It could account for the difference in abilities between the sexes. Jing Feng, lead author of the study, explains:

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.

Even more important is what the research team discovered next:

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… Moreover, the improved performance of both sexes was maintained when we assessed them again after five months.

Prof. Ian Spence, director of the university’s engineering psychology laboratory, speculated that playing twitch games activates certain genes responsible for developing neurons that process spatial awareness.

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.

Spence hopes that this could lead to more women entering the fields of math and engineering, since spatial skills are an important component of these disciplines.

- Wondering how many applications to the College of Engineering will now list “plays video games” among the prerequisites, GP Canadian Correspondent Colin “Jabrwock” McInnes

http://gamepolitics.com/2007/10/03/a...ays-new-study/

[charlespt]

Really?
That's interesting