Sleight of Hands

Game Description

If you are one of those people that needs a GPS to get around your neighborhood, this is the game for you. This exercise consists of deciding whether the hand which appears briefly on the screen is a left or a right hand. Sounds easy? Go ahead and try. To give you a bit of a challenge, the hand will be presented under three different conditions: just the hand itself, on a body, or a mirror image of itself.

Cognitive Function Exercised

It is widely acknowledged in neuroscience and psychology research that problem solving abilities rely not only on language-analytical reasoning but also temporal-spatial design skills that we use to visualize some problems. Mental rotation, the main ability used in this exercise, usually takes place in the right cerebral hemisphere of the brain, more specifically, in the parietal regions where perception also occurs. Mental rotation comparison tasks can be analyzed into five steps: (1) create a mental image of an object, (2) rotate the object mentally until a comparison can be made, (3) make the comparison, (4) decide if the objects are the same or not and (5) report the decision.

Benefits to Daily Life

Spatial reasoning is an important ability that generates and conceptualizes solutions to multi-step problems that arise in areas such as architecture, engineering, science, mathematics, art, games, and everyday life. On a daily basis, we use our skills to navigate through streets, use maps, play jigsaw puzzles or pool, decorate our home or study geometry and physics. So go ahead, practice at manipulating representations: project, rotate, reflect, invert, fold and unfold!