Video games that contain high levels of action can actually
improve your vision, claim researchers at the University of Rochester. Their
findings, which will appear in the journal Psychological
Science, show that people who played action video games for a few hours
a day over the course of a month improved by about 20 percent in their ability
to identify letters presented in clutter—a visual acuity test similar to ones
used in regular ophthalmology clinics.
“Action video game play changes the way our brains
process visual information,” says Daphne Bavelier, professor of brain and
cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester. “After just 30 hours,
players showed a substantial increase in the spatial resolution of their
vision, meaning they could see figures like those on an eye chart more clearly,
even when other symbols crowded in.”
Bavelier and graduate student Shawn Green tested college
students who had played few, if any, video games in the last year. “That alone
was pretty tough,” says Green. “Nearly everybody on a campus plays video
games.”
At the outset, the students were given a crowding test,
which measured how well they could discern the orientation of a “T” within a
crowd of other distracting symbols—a sort of electronic eye chart. Students
were then divided into two groups. The experimental group played Unreal Tournament for roughly one hour a
day. The control group played Tetris,
a game the researchers believe is equally demanding in terms of motor control,
but visually less complex than the shooter.
After about a month of near-daily gaming, the Tetris players showed no improvement on
the test, but the Unreal Tournament
players could tell which way the “T” was pointing much more easily than they
had just a month earlier.
“When people play action games, they're changing the brain's
pathway responsible for visual processing,” says Bavelier. “These games push
the human visual system to the limits and the brain adapts to it. That learning
carries over into other activities and possibly everyday life.”
The improvement was seen both in the part of the visual
field where video game players typically play, but also beyond—the part of your
vision beyond the monitor. The students' vision improved in the center and at
the periphery where they had not been “trained.” That suggests that people with
visual deficits, such as amblyopic
patients, may also be able to gain an increase in their visual acuity with
special rehabilitation software that reproduces an action game's need to
identify objects very quickly.
