Can gamification improve children's performance in mental rotation?

A common obstacle in cognitive development research is that many cognitive tasks can be long, repetitive, and hence seemingly boring for children. The current study examined whether incorporating gamification elements could make a classic mental rotation task more child-friendly and engaging for young children. A total of 100 children aged 6 to 9 years participated in two mental rotation tasks, where one included gamification elements and the other did not. Results showed that gamification indeed improved performance on the task. Furthermore, this effect did not vary as a function of age, gender, or task difficulty. However, it interacted with testing order, such that those children who received the baseline condition first improved their performance in the gamification condition later on, whereas those children who received the gamification condition first were able to maintain a good performance in the baseline condition later on. Lastly, although some personality factors (e.g., Agreeableness, Openness to Experience) correlated with the overall performance, they did not predict the gamification effects. Therefore, our results have practical implications for using gamification in designing cognitively demanding tasks for children. Theoretically, they help to further understand how gamification affects cognition.