Normally, improving contrast sensitivity means using glasses or surgery to correct the eye. But we've found that action video games train the brain to process visual information more efficiently and improve vision.
Daphne Bavelier
The average age of a gamer is 33 years old, not eight years old, and in fact, if we look at the projected demographics of video game play, the video game players of tomorrow are older adults.
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.
We know there are good sugars and bad sugars, and we don't discuss whether food in general is good or bad for us. We need to be far more nuanced when we talk about the effects of video games.
We have a large amount of data that shows playing fast-paced games improves hand-eye co-ordination, the ability to focus on the task at hand, and your ability to make decisions, as gaming improves your brain's allocation of resources.
'Screen time' is meaningless - what matters is what you do while on the screen. The good, the bad, and the ugly faces of screen time will all have to do with which activities you engage into.
Action game players make more correct decisions per unit time. If you are a surgeon or you are in the middle of a battlefield, that can make all the difference.
In order to sharpen its prediction skills, our brains constantly build models, or 'templates,' of the world. The better the template, the better the performance. And now we know playing action video game actually fosters better templates.
Studies of social games, puzzle games, and brain-training games have shown they have little effect on the brain despite often being marketed as improving memory and reaction speeds.
Everybody thought that screen time was bad for vision. Well, it happens that spending a lot of time reading on a computer is bad for your vision, but spending a lot of time playing first-person-shooter games is good for your vision.
You can't compare the effect of multimedia-tasking and the effect of playing action games. They have totally different effects on different aspects of cognition, perception and attention.
We need to go beyond saying, 'I know what these games do because I see my son playing them,' and try to understand the complexities - that different video games have different effects.
People who played action video games have better vision in the sort of conditions where there is not much contrast. It can make all the difference when driving at dusk, or in fog, in being able, for instance, to see a dog crossing the road in twilight.
