Abstract
Expertise within gaming (e.g., chess, video games) and kinesthetic (e.g., sports, classical dance) activities has been found to be linked with specific cognitive skills. Some of these skills, working memory, mental rotation, problem solving, are linked to higher performance in science, technology, math, and engineering (STEM) disciplines. In the present study, we examined whether experience in a different activity, hip hop dance, is also linked to cognitive abilities connected with STEM skills as well as social cognition ability. Dancers who varied in hip hop and other dance style experience were presented with a set of computerized tasks that assessed working memory capacity, mental rotation speed, problem solving efficiency, and theory of mind. We found that, when controlling for demographic factors and other dance style experience, those with greater hip hop dance experience were faster at mentally rotating images of hands at greater angle disparities and there was a trend for greater accuracy at identifying positive emotions displayed by cropped images of human faces. We suggest that hip hop dance, similar to other more technical activities such as video gameplay, tap some specific cognitive abilities that underlie STEM skills. Furthermore, we suggest that hip hop dance experience can be used to reach populations who may not otherwise be interested in other kinesthetic or gaming activities and potentially enhance select sociocognitive skills.
Highlights
Accumulating evidence suggests that expertise in non-academic areas is connected to cognitive processes
To determine whether hip hop dance experience may be connected to mental processes underlying academic performance, we examined whether accumulated experience in this activity was linked with individual differences in working memory, mental rotation, problem solving, and social cognition skills
We explored whether individual differences in performance on tasks tapping different sociocognitive abilities were connected to hip hop dance experience
Summary
Accumulating evidence suggests that expertise in non-academic areas is connected to cognitive processes. Recent research indicating that video game players outperform novices on tests of visuospatial attention provides evidence that these links are observed with a broad range of informal activities [3]. A smaller body of research that has focused on arts- and humanities-related activities suggest that experience in these domains may be connected to cognitive as well as sociocognitive processes. Individuals with acting experience have been found to outperform novices when inferring the emotion states of others [4]. In light of this evidence, it is important to investigate what types of arts and humanities experiences are linked to cognitive and social skills especially as their availability to students at K-12 schools is at risk of being
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