Action games (specifically the violent shooter type) can improve a player's eyesight, according to a new study funded by the National Eye Institute and the Office of Naval Research.
The games, Bavelier belives, enhance a player's "contrast sensitivity," that is, their ability to discern differences between slightly different shades of grey within a given visual scene.
For the study, Bavelier and her team tested the contrast sensitivity of a group of 22 students.
Once that baseline had been established, the group was split in half. One group was tasked with playing Call of Duty 2 and Unreal Tournament 2004, while the other was asked to play The Sims 2 -- a game Yahoo News describes as "richly visual" but not requiring the same level of visual-motor coordination as the shooter titles.
After spending 50 hours with their assigned games over a 9 week period, the students' vision was again tested. Those students assigned to the action games showed a 43 percent increase in contrast sensitivity, while those who played The Sims showed no improvement.
Additionally, Bavelier observed a 58 percent increase in those who played action games regularly over those who play no games.
"To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration that contrast sensitivity can be improved by simple training," Bavelier told Yahoo News. "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, and we've seen the positive effect remains even two years after the training was over."
Image: notsogoodphotography/Flickr
Action Video Games Improve Vision [Yahoo News]
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