"People have spatial reasoning, something computers are not yet good at, " Dr Cooper said.

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Gains Through Gaming tested thirty-nine adults between the ages of 60 and 77 for certain cognitive abilities, such as spatial reasoning.

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Combined with the male special skills and strengths of logic, spatial reasoning and prioritisation ranking we could reach remarkable tech frontiers for our species.

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Similarly, people who excel at packing odd shaped objects in way that maximizes the use of storage space are able to do this because they have developed complex spatial reasoning skills.

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My spatial reasoning skills have never been sharper.

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"It is a spatial reasoning task for the robot to understand that its arm is on it not on the other side of the mirror, " Justin Hart, the PhD student leading the research told BBC News.

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It was an astonishing triumph of human visual-spatial reasoning, and one of the first major scientific advances to come from playing a video game (though plenty of software engineers I know would argue that video games activate much more creativity than we care to acknowledge).

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People who were asked to reflect on their many past successes or a specific failure scored roughly 10% better on tests of mathematical ability, as well as verbal, spatial, and abstract reasoning, than those who reflected on either many past failures or a single specific success.

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