The Shadowclan Dark Moot

[Gazhul]

Here's an experiment published recently in Psychological Science that has added to the mountain of evidence that cognitive differences between men and women, to the extent that they exist, are generally cultural and not biological in origin. This experiment in particular gave quite an exciting result, because feats such as mental rotation are overwhelmingly assumed to be naturally favored by men. Here's the bibliographical info and abstract:

Jing Feng, Ian Spence, Jay Pratt (2007) "Playing an Action Video Game Reduces Gender Differences in Spatial Cognition". Psychological Science 18 (10), 850–855.

[Gul'Wur]

Extremely interesting.

Now we just need the feminists to get to play some action games, maybe they'll smarten up *snickers*.

If you follow the field, could you link me to some of the research on cognitive differences of men and women being cultural?

[K'Dahbruh]

Did you read the actual paper, or just the abstract?

The abstract you quoted does not support the conclusion you made. If you have the text of the paper, can you quote the relevant portions here?

[Gabriel]

Agreed with K'Dah. Even if (some of) the differences can be trained away, that does not automatically lead to the conclusion that the source of the differences is cultural. Lefthanded people can, with practice, become fully competent with righthanded operations but that doesn't falsify the original predisposition.

[Gazhul]

Full text: http://www.richardsimoes.com/videogame.pdf

The abstract itself does support my conclusion, though, especially the fact that, given the same training for the same amount of time, women magically catch up with men in the cognitive tests that followed. The training is a perfectly-controlled variable in this experiment. If this difference were biologically encoded, we would expect women to perhaps improve after training, but men to still perform well above them in the testing.

[Gabriel]

[K'Dahbruh]

[Derug]

There's also a mountain of evidence showing cognitive differences.

We're not the same. We're not completely different. This should be unsurprising to anyone living in the real world.

[Ake]

I just want to be a part of that study so I can get paid $10/hour to play video games.

*lobbies for more experiments of this type*

Seriously, though. This is an interesting study. One paper based upon one study isn't going to prove anything indefinitely, but it does pose some interesting questions on how far those cognitive differences extend. More experimentation would definitely be required.

There also seems to be something overlooked here. It's possible that women are able to adapt such that they more quickly acquire the cognitive skills to better perform on spatial tasks. It would be interesting to carry out the experiment longer to see whether or not women ultimately surpass men or if everyone eventually levels out around the same scores--but since several subjects maxed out performance on the test, they'd need to re-think the spatial tasks in order to make it more difficult for everyone to get perfect scores. The results of the testing just showed that women made such large leaps and bounds that they closed the initial gap while men made minimal improvements.

It would also be interesting to divide non-human primates by gender and see if they differ at all after a similar experiment (I'm not suggesting we train chimps to play video games, as cool as that would be, but rather we come up with a chimp equivalent for testing their capacity for spatial relations.)

One of the biggest barriers to getting my girlfriend to play shooter games with me is the complexity of the controls, which I guess is some kind of spatial-tactile manipulation that they don't really control for in the study mentioned here. Are there cognitive differences that make this easier for men than for women, and can that gap be closed by practice? I'm also kind of interested in how it differs based upon age as well as gender. All my friends who played much more video games than me as children (I was an outdoor kid who grew up to be an indoor kid) are much, much better at me in FPS. I have my moments in Halo 3, but I rarely ever take first place. I pretty much have to hide or stay behind everyone else and do opportunity-based killing in order to rack up the frags. I get a little better by playing more regularly, but I still never really catch up with them. My hand-eye coordinate just seems to be inferior. It's incredibly frustrating for a fragile ego such as myself

[Ikko]

Pigs play video games
http://aginfo.psu.edu/Psa/fw97/eye.html

Orangutans play video games
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18064686/

Both those aren't really video GAMES so here is a chimp playing pacman
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18064686/

Sorry to derail but somone mentioned chimps playing videogames

[K'Dahbruh]

[Derug]

[Gazhul]

[Gabriel]

[K'Dahbruh]

[Gazhul]

[Ekor Nhuk]

Ok, I'm an engineer and therefore clueless as to what the hell Spatial whatever thingie means. All I know is that women like shopping, colors, flowers and gestures of sharing the feeling while men like manly stuff (too many to list). Therefore, that makes me a complete chauvinist and Im proud about it too. I actually wish we'd go back to hunting and gathering.

Anyways Im off my point. What, in plain english (for non psych majors) does this mean:

[Derug]

It means that if we get women to play video games they can steal your job and add shopping, colours, flowers, and gestures of sharing the feeling to bridges, computers, or whatever it is you engineer.

Of course, that's somewhat like saying that if we can teach mice physics, they can do Stephen Hawking's job and postulate the universe's origins as having to do with cheese. Getting women to play FPSes is about as likely.

[Ake]