Violent Video Games Can Improve Vision

Ponca City, We love you writes "According to a new study, people who played fighting games on their PCs became up to a 58 percent better at perceiving fine contrast differences, an important aspect of eyesight. The breakthrough is significant because it was previously thought that the ability to notice even very small changes in shades of grey against a uniform background could not be improved. Contrast sensitivity is the primary limiting factor in how well one sees. Volunteers in the study played intensively for 50 hours over nine weeks with either Unreal Tournament 2004 and Call of Duty 2, and the results were compared with another group who played The Sims 2, which is richly visual but does not require as much hand-eye coordination. The improvements lasted for months after game play stopped. The new finding suggests action video games could be used as training devices as a useful complement to eye-correction techniques, since gaming may teach the brain's visual cortex to make better use of the information it receives."

Comments

Welcome to 1983

[DNS-and-BIND]

They had the same study out in 1983. Watching small objects dart around improves hand-eye coordination, who-da thunk it? The only difference is putting the yellow journalism label "violent video games" on it and getting Slashdot front page coverage.

Please tell me about OS X

[zippthorne]

That surely only matters if you're too retarded to enlarge your font size (which you can do even on windoze nowadays, though by default windoze does some dumb shit compared to linux/x11 or macosx, you have to reconfigure it).

I can't figure out how to make the menu fonts any bigger without breaking everything else.

For instance, if you use AppleDisplayScaleFactor, raster images get uglified and the mouse pointer breaks. Back in windows (XP), the I could just go through the display settings and "use large fonts" (and extra large, I think. In factors of roughly root 2) and all it would break annoyingly frequently, but still only occasionally, was the odd modal dialog's text flow in a usually still usable way.