It's something parents may be surprised to hear – video games can be beneficial for visually impaired children.
A new study found that after playing eight hours of kid-friendly action games, children reported up to a 50 percent improvement in their eye sight.
Experts found that training subjects to use their underused peripheral vision achieved gains in a short time, which also remained stable when tested a year later.
The study was conducted by teams from the University of Rochester and Vanderbilt University.
'Children who have profound visual deficits often expend a disproportionate amount of effort trying to see straight ahead, and as a consequence, they neglect their peripheral vision,' revealed Duje Tadin from the University of Rochester.
'This is problematic because visual periphery, which plays a critical role in mobility and other key visual functions, is often less affected by visual impairments.'
The team pulled components from action video games (AVGs) that they believed would have the greatest impact on perception and added them to a custom game designed specifically for the study
'As a result, we've seen up to 50 percent improvement in visual perception tasks,' said Tadin
Those who are skilled at playing AVG can distribute and switch their attention over a wide area.
At the same time, these users are aware of unexpected moving targets that may appear and are able to ignore irrelevant stimuli.
The team recruited 24 low-vision children from the Tennessee and Oklahoma Schools for the Blind.
According to the study’s lead author, Jeffrey Nyquist, founder and CEO of NeuroTrainer, the students’ issues with the periphery were in part attentional.
Nyquist and the team hypothesized that training the students to pay more attention to their peripheral visual field could have quick results.
Students were split into three groups: a control group that played a Tetris-like game; a group that played a kid-friendly commercially-available AVG, Ratchet & Clank; and a group that used the training game devised by the researchers.
All games were played on a large projection screen to better involve visual periphery.
And the game researchers developed were designed with a dual-task component.
While playing the game, students tracked multiple moving objects simultaneously while being on the lookout for another object that briefly appears and requires a response from the player.
The researchers created a training game with these specific task characteristics while eliminating other components of AVGs, such as the demand for speeded hand-eye coordination, and any violent or other non-child-friendly material.
'The goal is to pay attention to a number of objects over a large area, and to be prepared to react to unexpected events in the even further periphery,' explained Tadin.
It forces the low-vision students to expand their visual field—to shift their attention to the neglected areas of the visual field.'
After a total of eight hours of training, groups who played with the commercially-available AVG and the custom dual-task game showed significant visual improvements.
The students were able to better perceive moving objects (motion perception) in the far periphery, they were able to better attend to visual crowding, such as identifying a specific letter within a field of other letters, and they were much faster at finding objects in cluttered scenes (visual search) -researchers compare this to finding a stapler on a messy desk.
'We were surprised by the range of improvements, and we were even more surprised when we tested a few of the students a year later and found that the gains they made were stable,' said Nyquist.
'Within just a few hours of training, they were able to expand their usable visual field and visual search ability.'