How action games can improve our visual skills

Believe it or not, playing this game could be a good treatment for lazy eye, according to preliminary research.

At this year's meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the University of Rochester's Daphne Bavelier described her work on how video games affect the visual system. Bavelier's work focuses on action games and goes back over a decade. In that span, she has generated lots of evidence that the games are capable of improving the visual system by enhancing the functions of the brain regions that process sight.

The general outline of her studies are fairly similar: take novice gamers, and have them play either an action game (typically a first-person shooter), strategy game, or memory game. The amount of gaming is actually quite small: one hour a day, five days a week. "This is no excuse for binging," Bavelier said, noting that small doses work better than five hours a day spent gaming. Then, at the end of the training period, the participants are given a test of visual acuity.

A number of the results are exactly what you'd expect from a situation where fast reactions in complicated scenes are at a premium: gamers are better at picking out details in a cluttered scene, as well as picking out objects in low-contrast images. Although this isn't especially surprising, Bavelier noted that these are visual traits we often correct with glasses, so the improvements could actually have a medical impact, forestalling the need for vision correction.