Daphne Bavelier and her lab at the University of Rochester have demonstrated that playing video games can improve your eyesight, in particular, your ability to perceive contrast.

Li, R., Polat, U., Makous, W. & Bavelier, D. (2009).  Enhancing the contrast sensitivity function through action video game playing.  Nature Neuroscience.   (You can find the PDF of this article on Dr. Bavalier’s website.)

Perhaps this research can help us gamers as a whole to fight the bad reputation video games get as just a distraction and waste of time.  But the most exciting thing is that a completely novel method of improving contrast vision has been found.   Remember those days when we thought our brains could not be altered?  Well, this paper and others are demonstrating that our brains change with training.  But this paper in particular demonstrates how playing action video games can help you out.

This is an example of a Gabor Patch. The rate of its flickering, and length of its appearance can be varied.

To prove these ideas Renjle Li first took 10 men who played action video games at least five times a week and 10 men who hadn’t played a video game in over a year.  The gamers responded more quickly and just as accurately as their peers to test of contrast detection, called a Gabor Patch, in which the subject is asked to state when the Gabor Patch is visible on the computer screen.

After reading this part of the research I gathered that gamers on the whole are faster than non-gamers at the dot array test.  Thus, a correlation exists.  But does that mean the games made them that way or that people who choose to play games are just faster?  In order to demonstrate game play is the cause of the better performance, Renjle Li coordinated the following experiment.

The team randomly assigned six non video game players to play two action video games for a total of 50 hours over nine weeks, with no more than two hours of play per day.  Another seven non video game players followed the same rules but played a video game that involves directing the lives of simulated characters to achieve certain goals (interesting, but no action).  These subjects who averaged 26 years of age, and reported having played no video games of any type within one year’s time took the same tests as described above.  The action gamers responded to the Gabor Patch test at a lower contrast than the group playing the simulation game, and with similar accuracy.  This experiment proves that action games increased the action gamers’ contrast vision.

This link will take you to some of Dr. Bavelier’s lab’s more current research on the subject. Additionally, Ed Yong, a fantastic science blogger, who has been presenting real science research like this to the public for a while, and who now blogs for Discover, has an interesting post on the subject.

Please comment on this post if you would like to have an ongoing discussion on the subject.  I want to hear your thoughts.  And we’ll keep the Games Related Research Posts coming!

Li, R., Polat, U., Makous, W. & Bavelier, D. (2009).  Enhancing the contrast sensitivity function through action video game playing.  Nature Neuroscience.   (You can find the PDF of this article on Dr. Bavalier’s website.)

The Office of Naval Research posted an article about its program officer Dr. Ray Perez and his research discussing the benefits of playing video games.

If you’re interested in the subject I found a great paper from 2005 about Learning Games.

The Academic Advanced Distributed Learning Co-Lab members David Williamson Shaffer, Richard Halverson, Kurt R. Squire, and James P. Gee wrote an amazing paper about how video games may be the future of learning.  They discuss how video games can teach us so much more than how to use a gun.  They discuss how video games can teach a 14 year old politics, a normal person complex modeling, and help kids with cancer take better care of themselves. To find the paper use this link and scroll down to Joint Papers and find the working paper titled “Before every child is left behind: How epistemic games can solve the coming crisis in education.”

Don’t forget the FAS National Summit on Educational Games Report. The summit brought together more than one hundred experts to examine how to harness the power of video games for learning.  This report is widely cited and contains a collection of the reasons in favor of using games and simulations in education as well the issues that need to be addressed if industry and education are to be able to collaborate on learning games.

You can listen to the interview on NPR’s website. At the beginning of the interview, E. O. Wilson says that games are the future of education.  He says that gaming allows us to learn the way that we evolved to learn: by doing.

Who is Dr. Wilson?
From NPR site:
“Biologist E. O. Wilson, professor emeritus at Harvard University, is a two-time Pulitzer-winning ant expert who helped develop theories of island biogeography, chemical ecology, and sociobiology. A leader in the modern environmental movement, Wilson has devoted his life to understanding how all forms of life are connected.”

Who is Will Wright?
Have you heard of the video game, The Sims? Well, before the Sims, Will Wright created a game SimAnt, in 1991. And according to his story on NPR this morning, Will used Dr. Wilson’s work on ants to create the scientifically accurate game SimAnt.

Here we have another argument in favor of teaching using games. Games allow us to Do Things. FAS has long held this position, and we are always happy to hear when others say so, too.