Most of the media attention surrounding video games is negative, focusing on the violent or mature nature of the games. However, there may be a positive effect of playing video games.
One study published in the journal Current Biology found that playing video games can help improve reading skills in dyslexics.
"Action video games enhance many aspects of visual attention, mainly improving the extraction of information from the environment," said study co-author Andrea Facoetti of the University of Padua in Italy in a press release. "Dyslexic children learned to orient and focus their attention more efficiently to extract the relevant information of a written word more rapidly."
The study took children with dyslexia and had them play nine 80-minute sessions of video games, and tested their reading skills after playing video games. The researchers then compared the results to non-game players and found that the children who played video games read faster and more accurately.
Facoetti said this is a result of the video game selectively training the magnocellular-dorsal pathway, a circuit in the brain that is related to attention and motion perception. Dyslexia is often associated with a deficiency in this pathway, and by training the pathway by playing video games, children with dyslexia show improvement in attention, and therefore, reading skills.
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At DyslexiaHelp, we do want to remind you that at its core dyslexia is a difficulty processing the sounds of our language and then connecting those sounds with the letters. Dyslexics need systematic, direct instruction to learn to segment and blend sounds in order to read, spell, and write.