[crAzerk]

Actually, cognitive neuroscience or anything related to the brain is one of my most hated fields in Psychology =X Way too complicated and boring for me haha. But I do understand that it is an exciting new field that is very promising.

Nevertheless, since you've bothered to compose a reply, I am obliged to reciprocate.
Btw, it's 'spatial*' not spacial.

If the girls were out owning face as a regular occurance then this belief wouldn't have been able to form in the first place.

I'm not sure what you are arguing for or commenting about in this paragraph.

are you prepared to also discuss the difference in brain development which occurs between male and females which ultimately leads to a difference in spacial skills?.

I dare not pretend to be an expert regarding the neurological differences between males and females, because tbh I've forgotten most of the specifics (just took the module Biological Psych last semester )

However, from what I do recall, even though studies do show these subtle differences such as those that you've listed, others have also argued that these differences are not significant. For example, just roughly quoting a percentage (may be off) that I recall, when comparing certain spatial / mathematically abilities, while males are better than females (and vice versa) in some aspects, it was only 52-53% of the males who were better.


More importantly, in discussing any such neurological influences (e.g. females have xyz part of their brain larger than males, therefore they have abc ability better), it is a severe flaw to leave out environmental/social influences in the explanation.

To use a simple and well-known example, women are said to be more emotional than men, and some attempts have been made to tie it in to certain brain structure differences.
However, some obvious explanations that can be made for such behaviour is that societal norms do not condone a male being very emotional or expressive. Often, males who behave in such ways may even be ostracized or simply looked badly upon.
Thus, it could be due to societal influences that cause this observed gender difference in emotional expression.


Therefore, I do not find it sufficient to merely discuss neurological differences to explain any gender differences.

And, from your more educated than me but still learning perspective, would you consider higher spacial skills a possible reason for women on average being less skilled in RTS and FPS games?

And in turn, would the greater communication skills women posses account for at least some of their greater success in MMO games?

There is a fundamental flaw in this whole argument, in trying to compare females vs males and trying to show if females are better gamers, etc. The flaw is this - how are you measuring it?
If there were two hypothesis:

1) Males are better than females at gaming
2) Males are not better than females at gaming
(a standard psych paradigm of hypothesis testing)

How do you prove that 1 is true? Is it when there are more males good at gaming than females? Is it when a male beats a female? Is it when the top male player beats a top female player? Is one female being a dominant gamer in her field sufficient to cause the hypothesis to be rejected?

The truth is there isn't really a way to make this comparison, and too many other confounds creep in. For instance, when you say females have some success in MMOs, but a significantly larger sample size of males playing games as compared to females naturally result in a larger volume of male gamers who are better than females, you can't really make any arguments due to these confounding variables.

You can't really support a hypothesis like this because it is not testable, and the only thing that people have ended up doing is making a generalization based on what they observe (which is obviously limited and not representative)

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