Most of the time we complain about videogames, which seem to encourage violent impulses and physical slothfulness. Now comes news that playing fast-paced video action games actually improves vision.

In a study conducted by researchers at the University of Rochester and the Eye Institute at Tel Aviv University, students who played video games that require intense hand-eye coordination–”Unreal Tournament 2004″ and “Call of Duty 2″–improved their ability to discern subtly different shades of gray by 43 percent compared to students who played “The Sims 2,” which doesn’t require the same level of coordination. The two photos below show what that difference in contrast would look like.

“To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration that contrast sensitivity can be improved by simple training,” said Daphne Bavelier, PhD, professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester, who led the study. “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.”

Contrast sensitivity, according to Bavelier, is the primary limiting factor in how well we can see. The sharper your contrast sensitivity, in other words, the better you see. She believes action video games could be used along with eye-correction techniques to overcome a variety of vision problems.

© 2009 PDQhealth

Tags: contrast sensitivity, eyesight, videogames