Growing up, you probably heard this phrase a lot, "Get away from the TV, you'll ruin your eyesight!" Well, if you play games fairly regular, then you'll be able to put that old wive's tale to bed. Actually, science already did that, but there's still a very interesting study out there about the eyesight of gamers.
A new study from the Duke School of Medicine suggests that compared to non-gamers, "intensive" gamers have better visual skills. First published in the June issue of "Attention, Perception and Psychophysics," the study tested how well 125 non-gamers and intensive gamers could identify letters that flashed up for only a fraction of a second.
During the test, a circular arrangement of eight letters appeared before subjects for about one tenth of a second. After a delay measuring between 13 milliseconds and 2.5 seconds, an arrow appeared on the screen and the subjects were asked which letter had appeared in that spot. The "intensive" gamers beat out non-gamers in every time interval, suggesting an ability to detect visual information faster.
"They need less [visual] information to arrive at a probabilistic conclusion, and they do it faster," said Greg Appelbaum, assistant professor of psychiatry at the Duke School of Medicine in North Carolina, and one of the authors of the study.
According to the study's abstract, "action video game playing may be related to enhancements in the initial sensitivity to visual stimuli, but not to a greater retention of information in iconic memory buffers."
Besides the results of the study, another interesting factor was who funded it, namely, grants from the Army Research Office, Department of Homeland Security, and DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Apparently, the military has found that video game players have made for skilled pilots of unmanned drones. It's gotten to the point where the military has begun using controllers from different consoles to make drone piloting that much easier.
Moving forward, the researchers now want to gather data from MRI scans to see exactly what's happening inside gamers' grey matter.