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Discussions of male superiority in hunting/fishing/strangling things frequently get into all sorts of "studies" showing men are better at visuospatial tasks and thus biologically better suited to managing large corporations or doing math or making more money for the same work or whatever. But via Kevin Drum comes news of an interesting study that tried to separate the nature from the nurture in visuospatial skills:
Feng's team recruited 20 new students with no gaming experience. All the students were tested with the same task and a mental rotation task, and placed in pairs scoring similarly. One member of each pair was trained in a violent action game — Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault, while the other member was trained with Ballance, a 3-D puzzle game. They played their respective games for ten hours over a four-week period, then tested again.....While men scored better than women before training, after playing Medal of Honor both women and men improved significantly. The difference between males and females after the training was not significant — the gap between women and men was almost completely erased. Even more impressively, the researchers retested both groups five months later and found that both groups were still performing as well as they had right after training. The group playing Ballance showed no significant gains.Essentially, this suggests that a childhood spent playing video games and futzing with legos has strong effects on visuospatial development, and so the fact that many men end up with better visuospatial skills is no more inexplicable than the fact that many men are quicker at tying a tie. Obviously, it's just one study, and it's possible that the particular suite of visuospatial skills effected won't translate into real life advantages, but it's suggestive of how careful you need to be asserting biological differences given how different the world inhabited by girls is from the world inhabited by boys.
