van Dun Claudia, van Kraaij Alex, Wegman Joost, Kuipers Jorrit, Aarts Esther, Janzen Gabriele
Donders Institute for Cognitive Neuroimaging, Radboud University Nijmegen, 6525 XZ Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Green Dino, 6708 PB Wageningen, The Netherlands.
Brain Sci. 2021 Jul 1;11(7):886. doi: 10.3390/brainsci11070886.
Sex differences are repeatedly observed in spatial cognition tasks. However, the role of environmental factors such as gaming experience remains unclear. In this exploratory study, navigation and object-relocation were combined in a naturalistic virtual reality-based spatial task. The sample consisted of = 53 Dutch children aged 9-11 years. Overall, girls ( = 24) and boys ( = 29) performed equally accurately, although there was an increase in accuracy with age for boys ( = 0.09). Boys navigated faster than girls ( = 0.29), and this difference increased with age ( = 0.07). More gaming experience in boys versus girls (Cohen's = 0.88) did not explain any result observed. We encourage future confirmatory studies to use the paradigm presented here to investigate the current results in a larger sample. These findings could be beneficial for optimizing spatial cognition training interventions.
在空间认知任务中反复观察到性别差异。然而，诸如游戏体验等环境因素的作用仍不明确。在这项探索性研究中，导航和物体重新定位被结合在一个基于自然主义虚拟现实的空间任务中。样本包括53名9至11岁的荷兰儿童。总体而言，女孩（n = 24）和男孩（n = 29）的表现同样准确，尽管男孩的准确性随年龄增长而提高（r = 0.09）。男孩的导航速度比女孩快（r = 0.29），且这种差异随年龄增长而增大（r = 0.07）。男孩比女孩有更多的游戏体验（科恩d = 0.88），但这并不能解释所观察到的任何结果。我们鼓励未来的验证性研究使用这里提出的范式，在更大的样本中调查当前的结果。这些发现可能有助于优化空间认知训练干预措施。
