Unreal Tournament speeds visual processing, Tetris does not (is boring)

This is the best advertisement for a video game ever. The researchers compared people who played Unreal Tournament for 30 hours with people who played Tetris. They found that the Unreal Tournament players had an increase in visual processing speed:

Video games that contain high levels of action, such as Unreal Tournament, can actually improve your vision.

Researchers at the University of Rochester have shown that people who played action video games for a few hours a day over the course of a month improved by about 20 percent in their ability to identify letters presented in clutter -- a visual acuity test similar to ones used in regular ophthalmology clinics.

In essence, playing video game improves your bottom line on a standard eye chart.

"Action video game play changes the way our brains process visual information," says Daphne Bavelier, professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester. "After just 30 hours, players showed a substantial increase in the spatial resolution of their vision, meaning they could see figures like those on an eye chart more clearly, even when other symbols crowded in."

Bavelier and graduate student Shawn Green tested college students who had played few, if any, video games in the last year. "That alone was pretty tough," says Green. "Nearly everybody on a campus plays video games." (Emphasis mine.)

I suspect you could find a couple people who don't play video games. There are called women.

At the outset, the students were given a crowding test, which measured how well they could discern the orientation of a "T" within a crowd of other distracting symbols -- a sort of electronic eye chart. Students were then divided into two groups. The experimental group played Unreal Tournament, a first-person shoot-'em-up action game, for roughly an hour a day. The control group played Tetris, a game equally demanding in terms of motor control, but visually less complex.

After about a month of near-daily gaming, the Tetris players showed no improvement on the test, but the Unreal Tournament players could tell which way the "T" was pointing much more easily than they had just a month earlier.

"When people play action games, they're changing the brain's pathway responsible for visual processing," says Bavelier. "These games push the human visual system to the limits and the brain adapts to it. That learning carries over into other activities and possibly everyday life."

The improvement was seen both in the part of the visual field where video game players typically play, but also beyond -- the part of your vision beyond the monitor. The students' vision improved in the center and at the periphery where they had not been "trained." That suggests that people with visual deficits, such as amblyopic patients, may also be able to gain an increase in their visual acuity with special rehabilitation software that reproduces an action game's need to identify objects very quickly.

First, I don't know if I would say that the defining different feature between Tetris and Unreal is action. Maybe it is that there is more explosions in Unreal. Maybe images of blood improve visual processing. (Maybe it is just that playing 30 hours of Tetris is soul-suckingly boring, and the participants stopped trying.)

Second, do not construe this as a good reason to play video games until you get a deep venous thrombus. They should have also weighed all their participants before and after the study to see if how much weight they gained from lack of exercise.

Actually the most interesting part to me is that the improvements were also in the peripheral vision. I still couldn't rule out a priming effect or effects on attention, but I think that might suggest that there is a more global effect on processing as the researchers speculate.