Study finds no association between frequency of video game play and spatial abilities

A small study examined the associations between the frequency of video game play and spatial abilities. There was no association between how often a person plays action or non-action games and their performance on tasks examining visual and auditory spatial abilities. The paper was published in Frontiers in Psychology.

Spatial abilities are mental skills used to understand, remember, and manipulate the positions of objects in space. They help people judge distance, direction, size, shape, and the relationships between objects. Visual spatial abilities involve interpreting and mentally manipulating information that is seen.

For example, they help a person read a map, estimate distances, assemble objects, or imagine how a shape would look after rotation. Auditory spatial abilities involve identifying where sounds come from and how they move through the environment. For example, they help a person recognize whether a voice is coming from the left or right, judge how far away a sound is, or follow a moving vehicle by its sound.

Both visual and auditory spatial abilities support navigation and awareness of the surrounding environment. They are important in everyday tasks such as crossing a street, playing sports, driving, or locating someone who is calling from another room. These abilities depend on the brain combining sensory information with memory, attention, and movement. Spatial skills can improve through practice, such as puzzles, navigation exercises, music activities, and sports.

Study author Paul Pasescu and his colleagues note that playing video games might have the potential to enhance spatial abilities. However, despite some evidence suggesting positive effects, a substantial body of research reports little or no reliable impact of video game play on broader cognitive abilities, including spatial skills. With this in mind, the authors conducted a study in which they combined a video game experience questionnaire that asked about 13 distinct genres of video games with assessments of spatial abilities that differentiated between specific sensory modalities.

Study participants were 53 undergraduate students from the University of Lethbridge in Canada. Twenty-three participants were women. The study authors initially tried to recruit students who self-identified as regular video game players (i.e., “gamers”) from a neuroscience course. They managed to recruit 23 participants in this way. In the next phase, they specifically looked for non-gamers, but recruited only two. In the final phase, they opened the study to all students on the university campus, recruiting them through word of mouth and the Department of Psychology’s participant management system, which allowed students to receive course credit for their participation.

Participating students completed a questionnaire asking about their game play frequency across 13 distinct genres of video games. They also completed tests of spatial abilities that included a computer-based mental rotation task and a physical brick-building task to assess visual spatial abilities, and an Audio-Corsi Task to assess auditory spatial abilities.

Mental rotation and brick-building tasks assess visual-spatial 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.

Results showed no association between the frequency of playing video games and performance in either the visual or auditory tasks examining spatial abilities. Neither the frequency of playing action games nor the frequency of playing non-action games was associated with the examined spatial abilities. The only factor that successfully predicted better performance on the physical brick-building task was a participant’s self-reported comfort with playing with toy bricks.

“Although our results may diverge from some previous literature, it is important to note that prior studies typically relied on correlation analyses or analyses of variance to compare groups of ‘gamers’ vs. ‘non-gamers.’ Such a dichotomous classification was not feasible in the present study. Despite a specific call for non-gamers, the vast majority of participants self-reported meaningful engagement with video game playing,” the authors wrote.

“Moreover, by including 13 different genres, we likely reduced the possibility of identifying individuals with no gaming exposure whatsoever. More broadly, this might reflect a structural challenge in contemporary university samples in developed countries, where true ‘non-gamers’ may be increasingly rare or virtually absent,” the study authors concluded.

The study contributes to the scientific knowledge about the links between gaming and cognitive skills. However, it should be noted that the number of participants in this study was very small. Additionally, the study relied entirely on self-reported questionnaires, which only asked *how often* participants played a genre (e.g., “daily”), but not *how long* they played in each session or how many total years they had been playing. The study authors note that this lack of precise data, combined with their inability to recruit many non-gamers for comparison, may have obscured meaningful associations.

The paper, “Game over? examining associations between video game play and visual and auditory spatial ability,” was authored by Paul Pasescu, Daniela E. Aguilar Ramirez, Zitong Wu, and Claudia L. R. Gonzalez.