globeandmail.com: Video games sharpen eyesight, study suggests
ACCESSED: Mon Mar 30 2009 16:01:05 GMT-0500 (EST)
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Video games sharpen eyesight, study suggests
Reuters
March 30, 2009 at 11:32 AM EDT
CHICAGO — Adults who play a lot of action video games may be improving their
eyesight, U.S. researchers said on Sunday.
They said people who used a video-game training program saw significant
improvements in their ability to notice subtle differences in shades of grey, a
finding that
may help people who have trouble with night driving.
“Normally, improving contrast sensitivity means getting glasses or eye surgery
–
somehow changing the optics of the eye,” said Daphne Bavelier of the University
of
Rochester in New York, whose study appears in the journal Nature Neuroscience.
“But we've found that action video games train the brain to process the
existing visual
information more efficiently, and the improvements last for months after game
play
stopped.”
For the study, the team divided 22 students into two groups. One group played
the
action games Call of Duty 2 by Activision Blizzard Inc. and Epic Games' Unreal
Tournament 2004. A second played Electronic Arts Inc's The Sims 2, a game they
said
does not require as much hand-eye co-ordination.
The two groups played 50 hours of their assigned games over the course of nine
weeks.
At the end of the training, the action game players showed an average of 43 per
cent
improvement in their ability to discern close shades of grey, while the Sims
players
showed none.
Ms. Bavelier found very practised action gamers became 58 per cent better at
perceiving
fine differences in contrast.
“When people play action games, they're changing the brain's pathway
responsible for
visual processing. These games push the human visual system to the limits and
the brain
adapts to it,” Ms. Bavelier said in a statement.
She said the findings show that action video-game training may be a useful
complement
to eye-correction techniques.
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