Last year we discussed a great deal of research about the gender disparity in math and science. Even while women are more successful overall in school than men, in certain fields there is a very large deficit in the number of women participating. We mentioned one explanation in particular:
The male math advantage in a number of different studies appears to be directly related to visuospatial skills, the most important being mental rotation. In tests on calculation or other mathematical problems that don't require visuospatial skills, females perform just as well as -- or better than -- males. What's more, at least one study has found that it's possible to teach these visuospatial skills. Such a course has been offered at Michigan Tech for many years, and students taking the course have not only shown measurable improvement on visuospatial tests, they have gotten better grades in subsequent engineering and graphics courses.
But where did men acquire these superior skills in the first place? One possible answer is video games. While obviously video games weren't available to boys more than about 30 years ago, prior to that, boys may have acquired similar skills through male-dominated sports like baseball and hunting.
Shortly after our report, Jing Feng, Ian Spence, and Jay Pratt found that men and women who played action video games for more than four hours per week showed no disparity in one test of visuospatial ability, a Field of Vision task where they had to spot a dot flashing for 1/100 of a second in their peripheral vision. They were significantly better than men or women who didn't play action games. But male non-players were still better than females.
Could video game training erase this gender gap?
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译文:
电脑游戏将化解科学上的性别歧视？
上一年里我们讨论过大量关于在数理领域存在性别差异的研究。尽管女性在学业的总体表现上比男性要优秀得多，但是在特定领域里女性的参与人数大大不如男性。我们曾举了一个特例来进行说明：许多不同的研究表明男性在数学方面的优势与其在视觉空间上的能力直接相关，其中至关重要的是脑筋的急转。而在不需要视觉空间方面技巧的关于计算或者数学的其他方面的测试中，女性的表现则和男性一样优秀，甚至更好。
而且至少有一项研究表明这种视觉空间上的能力能够通过后天的学习而获得。这种学习课程已经在Michigan Tech实施了许多年，而选修该课程的学生不仅在视觉空间方面的测试中取得了显著的提高，而且在同期选修的工程学和制图等课程上取得了较好的成绩。
但是男性首先如何从哪里获得这种出众的技能呢？一个可能的答案就是电脑游戏。尽管大概30多年以前，或者比这更早，男孩子们还未能接触到电脑游戏，他们或许是由男性主宰的像棒球和狩猎等运动中获得了类似的技能。
在我们的报告之后不久，Jing Feng, Ian Spence,和Jay Pratt发现每周玩超过4小时激烈打斗的电脑游戏的男方和女方在一个视觉空间能力的测试中并没有显示出差异。该测试是一个视界任务，即他们要在各自视觉的百分之一秒内辨认出闪光点。他们明显比那些没有玩过打斗游戏的男女双方的成绩都要好得多。但是没有玩过游戏的男性仍然要比女性出色。
电脑游戏训练能够消除这种性别差距吗？
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