By LEE BOWMAN
SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE
Parents who warn teens that they will ruin their eyes playing video games may want to avoid the current issue of the journal Psychological Science.
In it, researchers from the University of Rochester in New York report that playing action video games for an hour or so daily actually helps sharpen visual acuity.
Specifically, in tests that assess the ability to see objects accurately in a cluttered space, game players scored higher than non-players.
"Action-video-game play changes the way our brains process visual information," said Daphne Bavelier, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at Rochester and the lead author of the study.
"After just 30 hours of training, people who didn't normally play video games showed a substantial increase in the spatial resolution of their vision, meaning they could see small, closely packed letters, like those on an eye chart, more clearly, even when other symbols crowded in," she said.
Researchers stress that playing video games won't have any effect on most of the things that influence a normal person's ability to read an eye chart, for example, the size of the eye, the shape and thickness of the cornea and lens.
Some visual deficits are not really optical in nature, but instead are the result of dysfunction in optical nerves and the brain.
"It is our hope that video-game training can help these people," Bavelier said.
The researchers anticipate that video games might be particularly useful for patients suffering from conditions such as amblyopia, or "lazy-eye" -- a situation where one eye becomes stronger and the visual nerve system suppresses the image from the weaker eye.
Bavelier said video games might even be useful in stemming visual impairment resulting from normal aging of the brain.
Only certain games -- first-person action games that require, say, spotting a target and shooting at it -- have the desired effect.
Slower, puzzle-style games such as "Tetris," showed no effect on test scores for a group of Rochester students who played the game daily for a month.
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