Playing video games may help sharpen your vision

Watching TV and playing video games for too long is considered bad for your vision. But according to a team of researchers, spending time playing video games might actually sharpen your vision.

Contrast is that property of human vision that allows an individual to distinguish one object from another, or from a background. Contrast sensitivity is a measure of this property. It tells about an individual's ability to detect objects that are not outlined clearly in a background.

Contrast sensitivity declines with age, and is also affected by disorders like amblyopia, cataract and diabetes. Till now, it was believed that CS could be improved only by spectacles or special training. Special training targets only a portion of the contrast sensitivity function (CSF.) However, Renjie Li, Uri Polat, Walter Makous and Daphne Bavelier feel that spending time playing video games could do the job more completely.

In a study, the researchers pitted “expert action video game players” (VGPs) against “non-action video game players” (NVGPs), both groups matched for age and gender, to see “whether vision, which should not be far from optimal under such conditions in young adults, may be further heightened by action video game practice.”

The VGP group played Unreal Tournament 2004 and Call of Duty 2, and the control NVGP group played The Sims 2. Both the groups played games which were visually challenging but had one crucial difference – the NVGP games had a slower pace and did not require “precise, visually guided aiming actions.”

The researchers found that the VGP group showed significant improvement in their CSF. “The size of the effect, albeit small in log units (0.16–0.2), represented a large percentage improvement (43–58%) and was extremely robust across the population,” said the report of their study, published in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

The researchers feel that this revelation will help build a “training regimen that improves performance over nearly the entire CSF in adults. These improvements were induced in central vision in young, healthy adults, supposedly at the prime of their visual abilities. This is of practical importance when driving at night or under degraded conditions, as well as during activities such as reading, which are known to correlate with CSF at 6 cycles per degree. More generally, our results establish that time spent in front of a computer screen is not necessarily detrimental to vision. The positive effect remained months and even years after training, indicating long-lasting gains.”