Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
Cited by 504

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 15 of the 15 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Video Games and Spatial Cognition

Spence, Ian, Feng, Jing·2010·Review of General Psychology

Abstract

Video game enthusiasts spend many hours at play, and this intense activity has the potential to alter both brain and behavior. We review studies that investigate the ability of video games to modify processes in spatial cognition. We outline the initial stages of research into the underlying mechanisms of learning, and we also consider possible applications of this new knowledge. Several experiments have shown that playing action games induces changes in a number of sensory, perceptual, and attentional abilities that are important for many tasks in spatial cognition. These basic capacities include contrast sensitivity, spatial resolution, the attentional visual field, enumeration, multiple object tracking, and visuomotor coordination and speed. In addition to altering performance on basic tasks, playing action video games has a beneficial effect on more complex spatial tasks such as mental rotation, thus demonstrating that learning generalizes far beyond the training activities in the game. Far transfer of this sort is generally elusive in learning, and we discuss some early attempts to elucidate the brain functions that are responsible. Finally, we suggest that studying video games may contribute not only to an improved understanding of the mechanisms of learning but may also offer new approaches to teaching spatial skills.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1037/a0019491

Cites

15 of 15 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 15 references

Cited by

See all 504

Metadata

Authors
Spence, I., & Feng, J.
Venue
Review of General Psychology
Published
2010-06
Volume
14
Issue
2
Pages
92-104
ISSN
  • 1089-2680 (ISSN-L)
  • 1939-1552
OpenAlex
W1998623387
Cited by
504
References
15
FWCI
57.68
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Video Games and Spatial Cognition. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1037/a0019491
The paper
Spence, I., & Feng, J. (2010). Video Games and Spatial Cognition. Review of General Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0019491

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.