After a study from the University of Illinois showed in December last year that playing complex video games can help improve older individuals’ brain power and mental abilities, the novel research says practicing violent action games such as Counter-Strike, Call of Duty, or Left 4 Dead can enhance ageing people’s vision.
Funded by the National Eye Institute and the Office of Naval Research, the research suggests action video games could be used as training devices and complement to other eye-correction techniques such as eyeglasses, contact lenses or surgery.
In the study, published on March 29 in Nature Neuroscience, volunteers who used a video-game training program saw improvements in their ‘contrast sensitivity’, the ability to notice tiny changes of light and dark against a uniform background.
Contrast sensitivity, which often degrades with age, is critical to everyday activities such as night driving or driving in fog, and reading. This visual ability to distinguish one object from another can be impaired by conditions such as "lazy eye", a common non-medical term used to describe amblyopia.
Amblyopia is a disorder of the visual system that is characterized by poor or indistinct vision in an eye that is otherwise physically normal. Eye surgery, glasses or contact lenses are normally needed to correct this form of eye visual disorder.
"Normally, improving contrast sensitivity means getting glasses or eye surgery--somehow changing the optics of the eye," says Daphne Bavelier, professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester, and the study's lead author. "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."
To reach their conclusion, Bavelier and three colleagues conducted two sets of experiments. They asked two groups to play video games for 50 hours during a nine-week course.
Volunteers in first group played action games such as Unreal Tournament 2004 and Call of Duty 2, and were compared with another group who played The Sims 2, which is richly visual but does not require as much precise, visually guided aiming actions.
After comparing the results of both groups, the researchers’ team found that People who played the action games had enhanced contrast sensitivity compared to players of non-action video games. The action game players showed an average of 58 percent improvement in their contrast sensitivity, while non-action gamers showed none.
In the second experiment, Bavelier and colleagues recruited 13 non-experienced volunteers, who were split into two groups and given intensive video game training lasting 50 hours over nine weeks. Players who received training to play two violent action games became up to a 43 percent better at perceiving fine contrast differences, compared with 11 percent for the simulation game players.
Crucially, the improvements lasted for months and, in some cases, years after game play stopped, the researchers said.
"To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report to identify a training regimen that improves performance over nearly the entire CSF (contrast sensitivity function) in adults," says Bavelier.
"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."
Bavelier carried out the research in collaboration with graduate student Renjie Li and colleagues Walt Makous, professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester, and Uri Polat, professor at the Eye Institute at Tel Aviv University.
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