Unreal Tournament speeds visual processing, Tetris does not (is boring)

i-d572fe8baa8cef1cc9216b7257b3cfdb-unreal.jpgThis is the best advertisement for a video game ever. The researchers compared people who played Unreal Tournament for 30 hours with people who played Tetris. They found that the Unreal Tournament players had an increase in visual processing speed:

Video games that contain high levels of action, such as Unreal Tournament, can actually improve your vision.

Researchers at the University of Rochester have shown that people who played action video games for a few hours a day over the course of a month improved by about 20 percent in their ability to identify letters presented in clutter -- a visual acuity test similar to ones used in regular ophthalmology clinics.

In essence, playing video game improves your bottom line on a standard eye chart.

"Action video game play changes the way our brains process visual information," says Daphne Bavelier, professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester. "After just 30 hours, players showed a substantial increase in the spatial resolution of their vision, meaning they could see figures like those on an eye chart more clearly, even when other symbols crowded in."

Bavelier and graduate student Shawn Green tested college students who had played few, if any, video games in the last year. "That alone was pretty tough," says Green. "Nearly everybody on a campus plays video games." (Emphasis mine.)

I suspect you could find a couple people who don't play video games. There are called women.

At the outset, the students were given a crowding test, which measured how well they could discern the orientation of a "T" within a crowd of other distracting symbols -- a sort of electronic eye chart. Students were then divided into two groups. The experimental group played Unreal Tournament, a first-person shoot-'em-up action game, for roughly an hour a day. The control group played Tetris, a game equally demanding in terms of motor control, but visually less complex.

After about a month of near-daily gaming, the Tetris players showed no improvement on the test, but the Unreal Tournament players could tell which way the "T" was pointing much more easily than they had just a month earlier.

"When people play action games, they're changing the brain's pathway responsible for visual processing," says Bavelier. "These games push the human visual system to the limits and the brain adapts to it. That learning carries over into other activities and possibly everyday life."

The improvement was seen both in the part of the visual field where video game players typically play, but also beyond -- the part of your vision beyond the monitor. The students' vision improved in the center and at the periphery where they had not been "trained." That suggests that people with visual deficits, such as amblyopic patients, may also be able to gain an increase in their visual acuity with special rehabilitation software that reproduces an action game's need to identify objects very quickly.

First, I don't know if I would say that the defining different feature between Tetris and Unreal is action. Maybe it is that there is more explosions in Unreal. Maybe images of blood improve visual processing. (Maybe it is just that playing 30 hours of Tetris is soul-suckingly boring, and the participants stopped trying.)

Second, do not construe this as a good reason to play video games until you get a deep venous thrombus. They should have also weighed all their participants before and after the study to see if how much weight they gained from lack of exercise.

Actually the most interesting part to me is that the improvements were also in the peripheral vision. I still couldn't rule out a priming effect or effects on attention, but I think that might suggest that there is a more global effect on processing as the researchers speculate.

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"I suspect you could find a couple people who don't play video games. There are called women."

Har de har.

And: I *like* Tetris.

And: I wonder if the difference between Tetris and Unreal Tournament is that in UT, your eyes have to move all over the place, while Tetris is this pretty proscribed up and down (and slightly side to side) movement.

I also wonder whether doing a real-life activity that makes you continually move your eyes all over the place pretty quickly (like, I dunno...playing basketball, or fencing) confers similar visual benefits.

Somebody do an experiment!

All I know is that i never saw unreal tournament when i closed my eyes...but tetris would haunt my dreams...

vanilla tetris is fun but somewhat boring, but there are plenty of spicy variants out there that are not. i used to play one called "acid tetris" which had increasingly insane techno music, wild visual effects when you cleared rows, a taunting happy face that would berate you when you started to do poorly, and a ridiculous difficulty curve. After that, plain ol' tetris was pretty mundane.

I have terrible vision, and i dont think UT nor tetris made any difference. In fact, they probably made it worse - blinking in either game often meant death.

Fuk a duck, this is really gnarly, dudes!!

Interesting study, I've noticed my distance reading improving after long periods of Halo play before. The aside for casual sexism was annoying though.

yep, i'm a chick, and yep, i play truckloads of video games.

i also prefer repetitive click-click-click games (of which, yep, tetris is the archetype). i'm going to have to contend that it's the 1st person shooters that are boring, though, that 30 hours of which would be soul-suckingly suicide-inducing. how 'bout we think of it non-intuitively: playing the shooters is rather like watching tv. you have a prescribed route, i.e., you have to kill this guy to get the weapon upgrade, which you then need to kill the boss, etc. meanwhile games like tetris, which seem more rigid, actually offer near-infinite ways to play. you're always in control of where and in what orientation you drop the pieces. success is defined by constantly besting yourself, rather than hitting the finite end of the game.

alternately, we're all just high-powered thinkers in real life, and tetris (ok, or bejewelled, zuma, cubis, trijinx...) is just a nice way to relax.

2 corresponding studies:

1. test to see whether length of productive concentration time is extended by playing tetris

2. see if the same type of visual processing speed improvement happens when you just *watch* UT being played, or by finding little images in the game (big moving where's waldo sort of thing).

and cephyn, i totally have visions of tetris (worst one was bejewelled, though) haunting my non-game-playing moments.

where are the pics?

im 14.....I have the original UT i play it so often i have only had atleast 10 hours of sleep this week. Its fun.