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With plenty of research pointing out the social and physical evils of gaming it is a surprise to learn that researchers at an American university claim playing action video games can actually improve your vision.
Researchers at the University of Rochester say they have shown that people who played action video games for a few hours a day over the course of a month, improved their ability to identify letters presented in clutter by about 20 percent.
“Action video game play changes the way our brains process visual information,” says professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester, Daphne Bavelier.
“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 university students who had played few, if any, video games in the last year. They were given an eye test beforehand – then divided into two groups – one played action game Unreal Tournament, the other played Tetris.
After about a month of near-daily gaming, the Tetris players showed no improvement on the test, but the Unreal Tournament players could decipher the “T” on the eye chart more easily than the Tetris group.
“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 team is now delving into how the brain responds to other visual stimuli and plans to use a new 360-degree virtual-reality computer lab now being completed at the university.
