From my position of scientific authority, based on my extensive expertise and as a result of my razor sharp deduction skills I have come to the conclusion that…
- Go is a game which if merely played doesn’t improve anything by any noticeable margin
- Go offers many opportunities to practice visualization and (visual) pattern recognition
- sufficient tsumego/game memorization practice could plausibly improve the ability to contextualize abstract visual patterns as it provides a language for anything reducible to 3-state dot-grid matrices
I wouldn’t hold my breath for some amazing superpower acquired by playing Go. Everything you do affects everything you can do in some miniscule way (because we’re analogy machines and some transfer effects are easy to measure), so don’t be surprised if you do find something.
Case in point. Look at this problem and find out if the depicted board state is solvable (i.e. are you able to fill all cells with matches?). I would argue that my decade-long experience with visualizing things in sequence made it easier for me to solve this in my mind.
Oh and if you wanted to find out if studying Go affects some specific other skill, what you’d need is a repeated measures design. Random sample of the population, randomly assigned to Go / No Go condition, pre-intervention skill assessment, mid-intervention skill assessment, post-intervention skill assessment. That’d be the bare-bones version. I reckon a year’s worth of regular Go study could yield noticeable results as measured by… say… scores on a test of circuit diagram analysis. Good luck. 