While men scored better than women before training, after playing Medal of Honor both women and men improved significantly. The test group then adjourned to the parking lot of a nearby Luby's and massacred 179 passersby.

Lol I sure hope that was a snark, RW.

I've always said that a childhood spent playing video games teaches many very useful skills to people, especially problem solving skills. Working with people and my parents, I notice that I can find ways around problems, or use knowledge to solve a seemingly unrelated problem, much easier than friends or family that didn't grow up playing video games. Except mechanical things, as my Dad, growing up an alley mechanic in the City, is much better at fixing my car ;)

The idea that most any person couldn't eventually get good at a skill because they seemed to show no natural ability for it, is absolutely crazy. Approach the new skill you want to learn with a little humility, a lot of hard work, and some motivation, and you can get good at it. Going into learning music, I had almost no ear whatsoever. Now I can tune my guitars by ear, figure out songs without sheet music or tab, and even write music. I learned by really wanting to get good, a ton of practice, and a little humility.

Gollee, feminists have been saying this is the case for years...and now they finally discover it?

Makes you wonder about the reasoning abilities of the so-called superior reasoners.

The spatial ability literature has a lot of studies over many decades involving a lot of people in a variety of circumstances and is quite robust. Few mental traits show such a strong gender based divergence over a wide range of tests, and even the "before" test in this case reproduced it.

The finding of this study is also more subtle than nature v. nuture. One kind of structural visualization training worked, another that also promoted structural visualization more directly didn't. A better hypothesis is that some trait other than structural visualization was advanced by the violent game, but not by the non-violent one -- intensity of concentration on the task, for example.

The MOE when each subsample (men v. women, one game v. the other) has just five participants is huge, rendering it's statistical signicance dubious.

Another recent small study in the same field in a Canadian university looked at women's spatial abilities and sense of direction through their monthly cycle and compared them to men. The finding was that women performed similarly to men while having their periods, but much worse at times of peak fertility. This suggestion for further research could also explain neatly two neat empirical facts -- (1) math and science performance in girls start to diverge more post-puberty; and (2) differences in math and science performance could be related to that fact that those courses are usually taught in an extremely cumulative format meaning that women are at great risk of being a performance low points at some critical moment in a class thereby impairing further advancement; the humanities and social sciences, in contrast, tend to be less cumulative.

Of course, neither study is large enough, or has enough replication, to make it meaningful on its own.

In any discussion of this subject, it is also worth recalling that the disparities basically differences in averages and standard deviations. Males have higher average performance in spatial ability and a greater standard deviation (some studies suggest that it is a X chromosome linked recessive trait primarily inherited from the mother) than women. But the data also make clear that some individual women are exceptional in this regard, while some men are pititful in this respect. I was a mathematics major as an undergraduate, and while women were a minority among both faculty and declared majors in the department, our brightest student and brightest professor were both women.

They found 10 male students with no gaming experience?

Those "men" cannot be trusted for the purposes of any study. Where they from the Amazon rainforest?