Shooter Video Games Sharpens Vision
March 29, 2009 by Ruibo
Reports on a study that was published in the science journal, Nature Neuroscience, has proven that games provide a sort of training for your eyesight.
Action FPS games such as Counter-Strike, Call of Duty, or Left 4 Dead provides excellent training for what eye doctors call contrast sensitivity, the study found.
Contrast sensitivity is the ability to notice tiny changes in shades of grey against a uniform background, and is critical to everyday activities such as night driving and reading. It often degrades with age.
“This is not a skill that people were supposed to get better at by training,” said Daphne Bavelier, a professor at the University of Rochester in New York state and the study’s lead researcher.
“It was something that we corrected for at the level of the optics of the eye – to get better contrast detection you get glasses or laser surgery.”
To find out, Bavelier asked two groups of non-action video game players to undergo 50 hours of training. One played a popular point-and-shoot game called Call of Duty, and the other played a game that offered a rich visual experience, but one bereft of action.
“We found that the people in the first group improved by 43 percent, and the other group not at all,” she said.
As important, the study also found that the improvement was not transitory.
“The positive effect remained months, even years after training, indicating long-lasting gains,” she said.
It’s good to hear that all this gaming is actually doing something that could be considered healthy.
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