Action video games improve reading skills, says study
New research claims that playing action video games can dramatically improve reading skills in children with dyslexia or other reading difficulties..
Two groups of 10 young children with dyslexia took part in the research. Both had their reading, verbal and attention skills tested before and after they played action or non-action video games.
According to findings reported in the journal ‘Cell Biology’, twelve hours of gaming achieved more for the children than a year of reading development and was as effective as the best remedial treatments.
Lessons learned from the research could “drastically” reduce the incidence of reading disorders, scientists said.
Dr Andrea Facoetti, from the University of Padua in Italy, said:
“Action video games enhance many aspects of visual attention, mainly improving the extraction of information from the environment.
“Dyslexic children learned to orient and focus their attention more efficiently to extract the relevant information of a written word more rapidly.”
However, Dr Facoetti stressed that the results “don’t put us in a position to recommend playing video games without any control or supervision”.
[John von Radowitz, Examiner, 1 March 2013]