Study finds that shooter games help sharpen vision

Get that Capt. Price out of my eye! - Image 1Here’s a bright spot amidst all the negative press that games have been getting lately. Recent findings have revealed that instead of dulling your eyesight, fast-paced shooter games can actually help sharpen vision.

Call of Duty: World at War - Image 1

But the doctor TOLD me to play this game, Ma!

Here’s a bright spot amidst all the negative press that games have been getting lately. Recent findings have revealed that instead of dulling your eyesight, fast-paced shooter games can actually help sharpen vision.

According to the findings, published in Nature Neuroscience, games like the Call of Duty series and Left 4 Dead provide excellent training for what eye doctors call contrast sensitivity, or the ability to notice tiny changes in shades of grey against a uniform background. It’s very critical to everyday activities such as night driving and reading and often degrades with age.

“This is not a skill that people were supposed to get better at by training,” said Daphne Bavelier, 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. What we found is that even without this correction you can help your brain make better use of whatever information is received from your retina.”

In comparing the contrast sensitivity of hardcore action players with gamers who preferred less action-packed fare, the researchers found that the action buffs were 50 percent more efficient at detecting contrast. This didn’t prove anything, though, as it was possible that the action gamers already had better than average contrast sensitivity before they started playing.

To further narrow things down, the researchers conducted another experiment where two groups of non-action video game players underwent 50 hours of training. One group got to play Call of Duty (it wasn’t mentioned which particular CoD), and the other played a game that didn’t have any action in it.

“We found that the people in the first group improved by 43 percent, and the other group not at all,” Bavelier said. Even better, she noted that “The positive effect remained months, even years after training, indicating long-lasting gains.”


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Via The Australian

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