Call of Duty: Not Just Black and White

Thanks to Daphne Bavelier from the University of Rochester in New York, video gamers now have a good reason to continue gaming! Ms. Bavelier put a study together showing that there is a correlation between adults playing action video games and an improvement in eyesight.

In the study 22 students were divided into two groups, on playing popular action game "Call of Duty 2" and the other playing "The Sims 2", a game proven to require less hand-eye coordination. For the next nine weeks the gamers were required to play 50 hours of their respective games. Once the nine weeks were over those who played "Call of Duty 2" showed an improvement in detecting different gray shades. "Action gamers" showed a 43% improvement, while "Sims Players" didn't show any improvement at all.

How important is detecting gray tones? Well, apparently being able to detect subtle differences in gray shades is important for night-time driving. Once the game playing has stopped these improvements continue for months after by training the brain to process visual information more clearly and efficiently.

In normal situations it would take glasses, contacts or eye surgery to improve contrast visibility but now that this study was done maybe optometrists can prescribe a healthy dosage of "Call of Duty".

Crystal Cabral (Group A Week 7)

Update:
It's so funny to think that it's good for surgeons to play video games. I guess it makes sense because video games seem to enhance hand-eye coordination. I'm not expert but I'm lead to believe that Call of Duty would be better than The Sims in differentiating gray hues because from what I can assume there are more grays in Call of Duty than in The Sims. I can also only assume that Call of Duty is more of a fast paced game than The Sims so maybe it causes your brain to differentiate the grays faster (because you have to while you're playing). As far as Alyssa's comment I'm not sure what you mean by your question because they already have craged wii fit, but I would think someone down the road will create something else close to that considering how obesity is increasing and so is the frequency of playing video games. I think we'll start using games to our advantage. I think plaing the game for 50 hours is just excessive but for the sake of arguing this experiment it makes sense. I don't think they were suggesting people stay in and play Call of Duty so they can enhance their gray hue detection. Everything in this update is purely opinion. Feel free to correct me, especially since I've never played either game.