Study Shows Gamers Have Super-Strength Eyes: Take That, Mom!
Maybe “super-strength” is going a bit overboard, but maybe, just maybe, video games are helping some of us evolve into humans with better eyesight.
A new study is claiming that the evidence they gathered from experiments with hardcore gamers and casual gamers shows that those hardcore geeks, er, I mean, gamers have elevated contrast perception (the contrast among different shades of greys). Usually contrast perception issues are the core of eyesight problems that require corrective actions, such as surgery or corrective lenses.
But it seems that some video games — especially the violent variety — are doing some of the corrections for us.
Daphne Bavelier is a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester, and she has been studying how video games affect players for years. Two years ago, her research showed that video gamers could pick out items in a cluttered screen better than those lame non-gamers. And in that study, it was the violent first-person shooter games that showed the best results.
See, I’m not wasting my time playing hours and hours of video games, I’m brain-training.
In Bavelier’s latest study, she broke her subjects into two groups. Each group had their vision tested, and then forced to play 50 hours of games before being tested again. The first group played violent FPS games Unreal Tournament 2004 or Call of Duty 2, and the second group played The Sims 2. Ok, you know that science research dollars are tight if Bavelier is using these old games in her testing.
Anyway, the FPS-gamers showed better contrast perception (about 58 percent better) after the 50 hours of “work”. Bavelier likened the improvement to the ability to see a car ahead of you on a foggy night when you wouldn’t have noticed it before.
Hey, any excuse to not feel badly about the time I waste playing violent video games is cool by me, and I say give this woman and her team more grant money…
video games, eyesight, health, gamers, study, contrast perception, University of Rochester, brain, FPS
