Drawing from Memory

[differenceblog]

Last month, we looked at Feng et al's (2007) research that suggested that player first-person shooter video games could improve performance in a mental rotation task - especially in women. Ferguson et al (2007), also published last month, found that men's and women's abilities to draw "masculine" and "feminine" object exemplars seemed to vary

Comments

Response to Ferguson

[differenceblog]

Dear Dr. Ferguson,

Thank you so much for your complete and informative response! I really appreciate it, and I'm sure my readers do as well.

I was very interested in the exemplar selection process you detailed in your article, but due to space constraints, I didn't explain it in today's post. Thank you for going into more detail on that. And
thank you for taking the jab at AOL in the tongue-in-cheek manner in which it was intended. After writing you, I was afraid you would read that as overly harsh, and take offense.

I really appreciate your feedback. It wasn't clear to me in the Sex Roles article whether there was any way to distinguish whether the games were 1st person 3D (as many violent games are) or whether they were 3rd person games. There's some very interesting research going on with the difference between 1st person shooters and other types of games in terms of spatial skill, and I was wondering whether your data had any way to reflect that.

(I will be posting this email to the site, so if you'd prefer to respond publicly, that would be great).

Again, thank you for your feedback!
Dan4th

1st and 3rd Person games

[differenceblog]

I'm used to taking grief over AOL (but it's free now!). :)

You actually raise a very good question about the difference between 1st and 3rd person violent games. Frankly our study did not examine these differences but rather used a more general rating of exposure to violence in video games. I think it would make a lot of sense to examine these differences in the future.

There is an expanding field of research looking at how first-person shooter games appear to increase (and yes many of these studies are experimental that can determine causality...at least in theory) visuospatial cognition. All of the studies I'm familiar with use 1st person shooters (there was one a year back that suggested playing "action" games improved surgical skills in surgeons!). By contrast research on non-violent games such as tetris do not show the same effect. Thus, first-person violent games appear to be "better" at developing visuospatial skills than are non-violent games.

I've done a meta-analysis that touches on this issue somewhat. Also recently published in Psychiatric Quarterly, this meta examines research on violent game playing outcomes (visuospatial cognition and aggression). Publication bias was a problem for both areas of research, however violent video games still showed a moderate relationship with visuospatial cognition improvements after correction for publication bias. By contrast there was no relationship found between violent video game playing and aggressive behavior, which goes a bit against the grain.

I'll forward that study along to you so you can hack it to bits. :P

Best,

Chris Ferguson

Meta-analysis

[differenceblog]

Wow, that's some heady stuff. For others interested, Ferguson's 2007 meta-analysis is available online to people with access to Psychiatric Quarterly -- or you can just ask me, since he was nice enough to pass along a copy.

I'm going to need to sit down with a stats textbook to get a handle on this, but the section on correcting for "publication bias" is fascinating. I hadn't even thought that was possible, and I want to take a closer look at how that's done.