A small study investigated the association between video game playing frequency and spatial ability. There was no association between the frequency of playing action or non-action games and performance on tasks examining visual and auditory spatial abilities. The paper is frontiers of psychology.
Spatial abilities are mental skills used to understand, remember, and manipulate the location of objects in space. These help people determine distance, direction, size, shape, and relationships between objects. Visual-spatial abilities involve interpreting and mentally manipulating visible information.
For example, it helps you read maps, estimate distances, assemble objects, and imagine what shapes look like after being rotated. Auditory-spatial abilities involve identifying where sounds are coming from and how they move through the environment. For example, it can help recognize whether a sound is coming from the left or right, determine the distance of a sound, or track a moving vehicle by sound.
Both visual and auditory spatial abilities support navigation and awareness of the surrounding environment. These are important in everyday tasks such as crossing the road, playing sports, driving, or finding someone calling from another room. These abilities depend on the brain, which combines sensory information with memory, attention, and movement. Spatial skills are improved through exercises such as puzzles, navigation exercises, musical activities, and sports.
Study author Paul Passescu and his colleagues note that playing video games can improve spatial awareness. However, despite some evidence suggesting positive effects, many studies report little or no reliable effects of video game play on a wide range of cognitive abilities, including spatial skills. With this in mind, the authors conducted a study that combined a video game experience questionnaire asking questions about 13 different genres of video games with an assessment of spatial ability to distinguish between specific sensory modalities.
Study participants were 53 undergraduate students at the University of Lethbridge, Canada. The participants were 23 women. The study authors initially sought to recruit students from neuroscience courses who self-identified as regular video game players (or “gamers”). In this way, they managed to gather 23 participants. The next step was to specifically look for non-gamers, but only two were hired. The final stage was to open the study to all students on the university campus, recruit students through word of mouth and the psychology department’s participant management system, and allow students to receive course credit for their participation.
Participating students completed a survey asking how often they played games across 13 different genres of video games. They also completed tests of spatial ability, including a computer-based mental rotation task and a physical bricklaying task to assess visual-spatial abilities, and an audio Corsi task to assess auditory-spatial abilities.
Mental rotation and bricklaying tasks assess visuospatial abilities by requiring participants to mentally manipulate objects or correctly reproduce spatial arrangements. The Audio-Corsi task assesses auditory spatial working memory by asking blindfolded participants to remember and reproduce sequences of sounds presented from different locations.
They found no association between the frequency of video game play and performance on visual or auditory tasks testing spatial ability. Neither the frequency of playing action games nor the frequency of playing non-action games was associated with the spatial abilities investigated. The only factor that successfully predicted better performance on the physical brick building task was participants’ self-reported comfort with playing with toy bricks.
“Although our results may differ from previous literature, it is important to note that previous studies typically relied on correlational analyzes or analyzes of variance to compare groups of ‘gamers’ and ‘non-gamers.’ Such a dichotomous classification was not possible in the present study. “Despite the explicit appeal to non-gamers, the majority of participants self-reported meaningful engagement with video game play,” the authors write.
“Furthermore, the inclusion of 13 different genres likely reduced the likelihood of identifying individuals with no exposure to gaming. More broadly, this may reflect structural challenges in modern university samples in developed countries; true ‘non-gamers’ may be increasingly rare or virtually non-existent,” the study authors concluded.
This study contributes to scientific knowledge on the association between games and cognitive skills. However, it should be noted that the number of participants in this study was very small. Additionally, this study relied entirely on self-reported questionnaires, only asking participants “how often” they played a genre (e.g. “every day”), not “how long” they played in each session, or how many years they had played in total. The study authors note that this lack of precise data, and the inability to recruit large numbers of non-gamers for comparison, may have obscured any meaningful association.
The paper, “Is the game over? Examining the association between video game play and visual and auditory spatial abilities” was authored by Paul Pasescu, Daniela E. Aguilar Ramirez, Zitong Wu, and Claudia LR Gonzalez.
