Playing with puzzles, blocks may build spatial skills

WASHINGTON: Children who play frequently with puzzles, blocks, and board games tend to have better spatial reasoning ability, a new study has found.

Play may seem like fun and games, but specific kinds of play are actually associated with development of particular cognitive skills, researchers said.

“Our findings show that spatial play specifically is related to children’s spatial reasoning skills,” said psychological scientist and lead researcher Jamie Jirout of Rhodes College.

Being able to reason about space, and how to manipulate objects in space, is a critical part of everyday life, helping us to navigate a busy street, put together a piece of “some assembly required” furniture, researchers said.

When the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence (WPPSI), a commonly used test of cognitive ability, was revised and standardised, it provided Jirout and co-author Nora Newcombe of Temple University an opportunity to study children’s spatial play and spatial thinking.

Jirout and Newcombe analysed data from 847 children, ages 4 to 7, who had taken the revised WPPSI, which included measures of cognitive skills that contribute to general intelligence.

The children’s spatial ability was specifically measured via the commonly-used Block Design subtest of the WPPSI, in which children are asked to reproduce specific 2D designs using cubes that have red, white, and half-red/half-white faces.

The researchers also examined survey data from parents about the children’s play behaviour and joint parent-child activities.

The data found that family socioeconomic status, gender, and general intelligence scores were all associated with children’s performance on the block design task.

Children from the low-socioeconomic status group tended to have lower block design scores compared to children from either the middle- or high-socioeconomic status groups.

Boys tended to have higher block design scores than did girls, though only after several other cognitive abilities, such as vocabulary, working memory, and processing speed, were taken into account.

Importantly, how often children played with certain toys was also tied to their spatial reasoning skills.

Children who played with puzzles, blocks, and board games often (more than six times per week) had higher block design scores than did children who played with them sometimes (three to five times per week), or rarely/never.

None of the other types of play (eg, drawing, playing with noise-making toys, and riding a bicycle, skateboard, or scooter) or the parent-child activities (eg, teaching number skills, teaching shapes, playing math games, telling stories) included in the survey data were associated with children’s spatial ability.

The research is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. PTI