Playing Shoot-em-up Video Games is Good for Your Eyes, a New Study Says

It seems counter-intuitive to think that playing video games would actually be good for your eyesight, but that's what a new study done at the University of Rochester has found.

Not all video games were found to produce this beneficial effect, though. It was action games, specifically, that improved players' sight.

The researchers divided their test subjects -- students who usually didn't play video games -- into two groups. One group played Unreal Tournament, described as "a first-person shoot-'em-up action game," for an hour a day. The other group played Tetris. Because Tetris is a less visually complex game, this group served as the control group.

After a month, the Unreal Tournament group showed an average improvement of 20 percent on a visual test that involved identifying letters presented in a cluster. The Tetris players showed no improvement.

"When people play action games, they're changing the brain's pathway responsible for visual processing," Daphne Bavelier, professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester, said. "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 vision of the Unreal Tournament players improved not only in the central area of their visual field which they used when playing games, but also in the periphery. According to the press release on the University of Rochester's website, "that suggests that people with visual deficits, such as amblyopic patients, may also be able to gain an increase in their visual acuity with special rehabilitation software that reproduces an action game's need to identify objects very quickly." (Amblyopia is a visual impairment without any apparent change in the eye structures, also know as "lazy eye.")

However, PC World Canada reports found a British optometry expert who disputed the results of the study, saying that the visual test used by the researchers (called the "T test") wasn't measuring what it was purporting to measure:

"According to Maggie Woodhouse, a senior lecturer in the School of Optometry and Vision Sciences at Cardiff University, the American researchers are confusing visual acuity with visual search, which is what the T test really measures. 'The test they're using is not for visual acuity,' she said after being told of the research. 'They've trained their students to make rapid eye movements and to scan large areas to find objects of interest. ... That is visual search.'"

Sources

Study says video games are good for eyes, Feb. 7, 2007, Reuters Life!

Action Video Games Sharpen Vision 20 Percent, Feb. 6, 2007, University of Rochester New Press Release, www.rochester.edu/news/

Study: Video games may partially improve vision, by James Niccolai, Feb. 7, 2007, IDG News Service, on PC World Canada, www.pcworld.ca