dimanche 19 février 2012

Believe It or Not: Online Browser Games May Enhance Your Vision

By Brian Zeng


Don't feel too guilty next time you spend another half an hour playing online browser games at work. Your employer would possibly not believe this right away, but you were basically acting for the sake of your health. Everybody knows how strenuous PC work is on our eyes, although not to many people are privy to the fact that ability games could be a way of keeping your vision in shape.

Research conducted by scientists from the School of Rochester has demonstrated that FPS (First-Person Shooter) browser games and skill games can enhance your brain's processing of visual signals. In a comparison between folk who play ability games for several hours per day and people who do not play games at all, it showed clearly that the 1st group is 20% better at identifying visible stimuli. Has a grand total of 30 hours of game play is sufficient to notice a major improvement in our spatial forms processing. This indicates that players are generally quicker at recognizing certain shapes than the remainder of the population.

In order to prove that, the researchers selected numerous scholars who either never played any skill games or played just a bit. They were subsequently split into 2 groups. Every one of them was asked to play a certain type of game for one hour a day: the first group got an FPS game, while the second was allotted an ability game that required as much hand-eye coordination, but was visually less complex.

The results were following: game play modified the way brain areas accountable for the processing of visible stimuli work. The more visually intense a game was, the more demanding it seemed to be for the brain. Apparently, with time the brain learns ways to optimize the processing of abundant visible stimuli, therefore its reactions are quicker also in real-life situations.

Games can also help treat particular vision conditions. A pilot study carried out by optometrists from the School of California at Berkeley has demonstrated that talent games can improve visual acuity and depth perception in adults with amblyopia, more typically called "lazy eye", which is a disorder most accurately described as vision lack in one eye that is otherwise ordinary.

The North American analysts have shown that as little as 40 hours of coaching are sufficient to noticeably correct the impaired vision. Amblyopia can be successfully treated at a tender age, yet in the case of adults it resisted all previously known techniques of treatment. The new observations are nonetheless , extraordinarily promising: the researchers discovered that intense training, e.g, working on a role of setting 2 horizontal lines parallelly, may increase visible acuity by as much as 30-40%.

Unfortunately, task like the above mentioned one proved to be not only very boring and dreary but also leading to only selective improvement. This is why the Berkeley optometrists made a decision to check the effectiveness of computer games, since they supply a greater diversity of stimuli. 20 patients with amblyopia aged between 15 to 61 years participated in the test. In part 1, 10 folk played shooting games for 40 hours. In part two, 3 other players spent the same amount of time to play less, but still visually stimulating games. All had their healthy eyes covered up for the time of playing.

Both experiments demonstrated a 30% improvement in visible acuity. To debar the chance the observed correction was a result of the covering, instead of game playing, a third - control - group was set. For 20 hours 7 volunteers kept their healthy eyes covered by everyday activities, such as watching TV, reading or browsing the Net. It turned out that the dream of the third group volunteers showed no improvement. Later , the same people were asked to cover their eyes and play ability games like the two first groups. After 40 hours of game play their visual acuity improved as much as with other subjects of the experiment.

In the light of the rising number of new discoveries about the probable advantages of PC related entertainment, we should potentially stop blaming ourselves when we sit down to spend two minutes with online browser games. They may prove not that harmful as it was initially thought.




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