Does Playing Improve Spatial Reasoning?

Some evidence, some overstatement, and a reasonable position between the two.

The claim that block-stacking games improve spatial ability is repeated frequently. The evidence is real, modest, and narrower than the claim.

What the studies tend to show

Research into visuospatial training with this kind of game has reported improvements on tasks closely resembling what the game requires: mental rotation, spatial visualisation, and speed at judging how shapes fit together.

Some studies have also reported changes in brain activity and efficiency associated with sustained practice.

What "improvement" means here

Almost entirely near transfer: you get better at things that resemble the trained task. Practise rotating shapes under time pressure and you get faster at rotating shapes under time pressure.

That is a genuine result and not a trivial one. It is also not the same as becoming better at spatial reasoning generally.

The far transfer problem

The interesting question — does this make you better at reading maps, packing a car, understanding molecular structures, doing geometry — is much less clear. Far transfer is notoriously difficult to demonstrate in cognitive training research, and the broader brain-training literature has been repeatedly disappointing on exactly this point.

The honest summary is that the evidence for near transfer is decent and the evidence for far transfer is weak.

What to make of it

Do not play this for cognitive benefits. Play it because it is enjoyable. If a narrow improvement in mental rotation comes along, treat that as a pleasant side effect rather than the point.

Anyone advertising a block game as brain training is running ahead of what the research supports.

The educational angle

Where it does seem genuinely useful is as a concrete illustration: it is a good, tangible way to introduce ideas about rotation, symmetry, tiling and polyominoes to someone who finds them abstract on paper. Teachers have used it that way for decades, and that use does not depend on any transfer claim at all.

Read next

• The Tetris Effect: Seeing Blocks With Your Eyes ClosedPlay long enough and the shapes follow you into sleep. It has a name, a literature, and a fairly mundane explanation.
• The Research on Blocks and Intrusive MemoriesSeveral groups have tested whether playing a visuospatial game after a distressing event reduces later flashbacks. The findings are interesting and preliminary.
• The Song Everyone Associates With Falling BlocksA nineteenth-century Russian folk tune about a pedlar, and how it became the most recognisable video game music ever written.
• Why This Particular Puzzle Is So Hard to Put DownClear feedback, a failure you can always attribute to yourself, and no ending. A design that keeps offering one more attempt.
• How to Open a DuelThe first twenty pieces decide more duels than anything that follows.
• How Online Duels WorkA room code, a direct browser-to-browser connection, and no account at either end.