Study: Action video games improve eyesight
Adults who play a lot of action video games may be improving their eyesight, U.S. researchers said on Sunday. They said people who used a video-game training program saw significant improvements in their ability to notice subtle differences in shades of gray, a finding that may help people who have trouble with night driving. “Normally, improving contrast sensitivity means getting glasses or eye surgery — somehow changing the optics of the eye,” said Daphne Bavelier of the University of Rochester in New York, whose study appears in the journal Nature Neuroscience. “But we’ve found that action video games train the brain to process the existing visual information more efficiently, and the improvements last for months after game play stopped.”
For the study, the team divided 22 students into two groups. One group played the action games “Call of Duty 2″ by Activision Blizzard Inc and Epic Games’ “Unreal Tournament 2004.” A second played Electronic Arts Inc’s “The Sims 2,” a game they said does not require as much hand-eye coordination. The two groups played 50 hours of their assigned games over the course of nine weeks. At the end of the training, the action game players showed an average of 43 percent improvement in their ability to discern close shades of gray, while the Sims players showed none. Bavelier found very practiced action gamers became 58 percent better at perceiving fine differences in contrast. “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,” Bavelier said in a statement. She said the findings show that action video-game training may be a useful complement to eye-correction techniques.
Source: Reuters
Comments(42)
that is good news for gamers, we can be better commandos
Take that all you "Video games are evil" people!
Take that Jack Thompson! Direct on the face for you!
Shame they cant say this about w@nking
that real good news for us gamers keep it up
Add to that the fact that prolonged reading can contribute to myopia, and you get some pretty direct irony. Video games = good for you/ books = bad for you. who knew?
What the hell is with this website randomly directing me to other websites?
It keeps crashing my browser at home, and at work it just redirects me. – If keep haveing to click the 'back' button.
- Same if I use firefox.
- The only way I've been able to avoid these stupid redirects was when I was using my sisters computer, and a visus blocker popped up with an error instead of the redirect occuring…
Martin! Sort it out!
well i love these games em… i think its true
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enjoy
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heck yeah
@7 "James A",
No, YOU sort it (being YOUR computer with bad user!) out!
There's been gazillion n00bs whining about the ads and/or redirects and somehow they all managed to avoid good tips from other users shared again and again!
Google is your friend. Try "AdBlock Plus" and "NoScript" after learning a bit first…
I guess our mothers are wrong about games after all, it is good for you yeah lol
improove your mind
http://canfindonline.com/photos/funny-people-and-animal/animal-out-of-windows/
Good one pirate. The irony too is, I had to read this. Single megaupload link please so I can quickly get back to playing video games, I have a medical reason now!
LOSERS!!!! I think that says it all.
Yes! We can be better commandos at home. We'll play H.A.W.X. with our "joysticks" and stick it in the hole. Yeah! Wank! Wank! Fire in the hole!
This is a blog, not a newspaper.
"The new research builds on similar work by Bavelier that was published in the journal Psychological Science in February 2007. Bavelier's work was then funded by the National Institutes of Health; currently, it's funded by the National Eye Institute and the Office of Naval Research.
The U.S. military has for years been at the forefront of using video games for training and recruitment.
…Often video game study findings correlate with the funding organization's political and social agenda, a coincidence that raises questions about the validity of the science that produced the findings.
In considering the palliative effective of video games on vision, one should bear in mind that video game playing also has been associated with computer vision syndrome and musculoskeletal disorders."
Quote in message above from
http://www.informationweek.com/news/personal_tech/virtualworlds/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=216401807
finally a good excuse so i can play till my eyes bleed
@ 17. me – well, if US Military is conducting the tests, then it should be pretty accurate and objective – it's not like they are paid for making PC games look good. They simply want to find out what's best for them…
as for the test itself … 22 test subjects isn't exactly a lot … in fact it's a very poor sample – but I still like the "results" xD
soo that meens that I AM a super uber little holy mega ultra giga cyberg I play soo much action games than I remeber xD
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If they are trying to improve eyesight why are they playing on consoles with their sh!tty textures, jagged edges, and blurry graphics. They should play on PC on a 52" in true 1080p for a better experience.
link to your news sources, Martin
ehm havent we figured that out like at least 10 years ago?
This study is clearly biased.
1. The sample size is ridiculously small.
2. Over a period of nine weeks, alot of stuff coulda happened, and there is nothing stopping them from playing more.
This is just in: Only americans believe such news, without reference and basis scientific proof.
The guy who tested this was from gaming company I guess. I'm a gamer but I don't think it improve my eyesight ……..or the researchers just got nothing to do and needs to come up with something that stands out ….
So does smoking weed. So if i sit at home, eat carrots, smoke weed and play video games all day my eyes will last forever!!
my body will atrophy into nothing but my gelatonous eye balls will still see everything in 20/20
Smoking weed doesn't improve eyesight. It just relieves pressure, thus preventing/curing glaucoma.
Ok, I'll go download more stuff for my PC, just so I can use a website that has these stupid ads….
Thanks
It also improves the frames per second the eye can see. After years of playing Quake and UT everything below 30fps looks like a slide show, including movies. It's the downside of it.
its call the placebo affect
Yeah off to another 4hrs fallout 3 straight, of course after "doing" homework
Martin why are you posting Fake news . when i called them up , they say its not true and the the sites you go to get this information is Coming from dis-informative Sites and this is not the first time. same thing was done with the mac . when i called them, they said it was Not True.Video games Do Not IMprove the Eye Sight, It Destroys it .Slowly but, surely .you people are just ………
Is this the CAC @ H4 Mosul in Iraq ?
Only 50 hours over 9 weeks?? More like 50 hours in 1 week. xD
Yeah.. sure, if that was true I wouldn't be using glasses, though I think what ruined my vision was those old crt's when I was a kid, ever since I used lcd screens my eyes never got worse.
If you play FPS games and masturbate do they give you normal vision?
Jake, the requirements for masturbation are:
* "mind's eye"
* palms
FPS games are optional
~_^
CRT bad for your eyes? Huh? I've never read this, if this were the case you'd think people would have heard it. I have a CRT HDTV and CRT Monitor, both work just fine, had this monitor about 10 years and the TV about 5 but had CRTs tv's my whole life before that…. if I'd read anything about other TVs were better for your eyes than CRT it woulda effected my decision on getting this HDTV, but at the time everything I read said CRTs were the best (besides physical size/weight) and I read lotsa articles to be sure, none mentioned bad for your eyes. meh, site a source please.