The Advantages of GAMING

• Successful treatment of amblyopia. Amblyopia (also called “lazy eye”) is a disorder arising from early childhood in which one eye becomes essentially non-functional. Li and colleagues (2011) performed experiments in which some adults with this disorder played action video games using only the bad eye (the good eye was covered). Other adults with the disorder did other things with the good eye covered, such as knitting or watching television. The result was that those in the gaming condition showed great improvement—often to normal or near-normal functioning—while those in the other conditions did not. Many in the gaming condition developed 20/20 vision or better in the previously “lazy eye,” and visual attention and stereoscopic vision (ability to coordinate input from the two eyes to see depth) were restored to normal.

• Improved spatial attention. Green & Bavelier (2012) found that action video gaming improved performance on the ability to locate, quickly, a target stimulus in a field of distractors--a test that has been found to be a good predictor of driving ability.

• Improved ability to track moving objects in a field of distractors. Action games improved the ability of children and adults to keep track of a set of moving objects that were visually identical to other moving objects in the visual field (Trick et al., 2005).

• Reduced impulsiveness. Action games improved performance in a test of the ability to refrain from responding to non-target stimuli, in a situation in which most stimuli called for a response but an occasional stimulus called for no response (Dye, Green, & Bavelier, 2009).

• Overcoming dyslexia. Dysexia, in at least some cases, seems to derive from problems of visual attention. One study showed that as few as 12 hours of video game play improved dyslexic children’s scores on tests of reading and phonology (Franceschini et al, 2013). In fact, the improvement was as great or greater than that achieved by training programs that were explicitly designed to treat dyslexia.