Video Game Peripheral Vision: Impaired-Sight Kids See Better

Video games can improve peripheral vision for visually impaired children in a quick and sustainable way, a new study shows.

The study conducted by vision scientists at the University of Rochester and Vanderbilt University tested whether video games could help children with visual impairment make improvements in their peripheral vision, which is often neglected when they have trouble seeing, said associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences Duje Tadin, Science Daily reported.

Using kid-friendly video games designed to train peripheral vision for just eight hours gave kids up to a 50 percent improvement in tasks related to visual perception, the study showed.

Twenty-four children with significant visual impairment were tested in the study. Training them to use their underused peripheral vision helped improve their overall vision by improving the children's ability to use their entire visual field.

“We didn’t improve the kids’ hardware — these children have profound physical problems with their optics, muscles, and retina, and we can’t fix that,” said CEO of NeuroTrainer Jeffrey Nyquist, who helped with the study, Science Daily reported. “But we could improve their software by training their brain to reallocate attentional resources to make better use of their periphery vision.”

The students who played the training game improved their motion perception in the far periphery, attended better to visual crowding, and were significantly faster at finding specific objects in the midst of clutter than the study’s control group.

Some students were tested a year later and the peripheral vision gains had not been lost, the study found.

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