Action Video Games Improve Vision In Adults

By Margarita Nahapetyan

Action video and computer games that involve guns and shooting may not be beneficial for a child's education, but they can be beneficial for a player's vision, claims a new study by the University of Rochester and Tel Aviv University scientists, who say that a person's night-time vision gets significantly better after getting a dose of the action-oriented games.

The findings point out that action games are providing players with a chance to improve their contrast sensitivity function (CSF) by as much as 58 per cent. If a person has problems with low contrast sensitivity it means that it may be harder for him or her to see at night, pick out spots on clothing or pick up on facial expressions. Contrast sensitivity is also known as one of the most vulnerable and easily damaged functions of the human eye.

The lead author of the research, Dr. Daphne Bavelier, professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester, hopes that video game playing may prove useful and beneficial as a treatment for certain kinds of eye-related problems. She conducted the study in collaboration with Dr. Walt Makous, professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester, Dr. Uri Polat, professor at the Eye Institute at Tel Aviv University, and Renjie Li, a graduate student.

For the experiment, the scientists involved a group of 22 students to test their contrast sensitivity function and randomly assigned them to 2 different groups. The first group was offered to play the action video games "Unreal Tournament 2004" and "Call of Duty 2." The second group was offered to play "The Sims 2," a richly visual video game that does not require any quick reflexes or hand-eye coordination. Each participant played 50 hours during the test that was going on for 9 weeks.

At the end of the test, the experts found that students in the first group who played the action games, showed an average of 43 per cent improvement in their ability to distinguish between close shades of gray. Volunteers in the second group showed no improvement at all. When the researchers compared participants who played action video games on a regular basis for more than six months to those who did not play them, the increase was 58 per cent, Dr. Bavelier said.

The results of this study are similar to the results of a previous study that appeared in the journal Psychological Science in February 2007, when the scientists from the University of Rochester found that people who played action video games for several hours daily during a period of one month, improved their general eyesight by 20 per cent.

The scientists suggested that the training effect of video game playing could last for years and could be a useful complement to other eye-correction treatment and techniques such as eyeglasses, contact lenses, or surgery. However, they also carefully warned, that not all action games can actually have such benefit for people with visual problems. They also say that, like anything, computer and video games may only be helpful if played in moderation.

The new study is published in the latest issue of the journal Nature Neuroscience. It was funded by the National Eye Institute and the Office of Naval Research.