Action packed video games were found to boost the reading skills in children with dyslexia, finds study.
"Action video games enhance many aspects of visual attention, mainly improving the extraction of information from the environment," said Andrea Facoetti of the University of Padua and the Scientific Institute Medea of Bosisio Parini in Italy. "Dyslexic children learned to orient and focus their attention more efficiently to extract the relevant information of a written word more rapidly."
Dyslexia
Dyslexia is a reading disability that occurs when the brain does not properly recognize and process certain symbols.
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The findings come as further support for the notion that visual attention deficits are at the root of dyslexia, a condition that makes reading extremely difficult for one out of every ten children, Facoetti added. He emphasized that there is, as of now, no approved treatment for dyslexia that includes video games.
Facoetti's team, including Sandro Franceschini, Simone Gori, Milena Ruffino, Simona Viola, and Massimo Molteni, tested the reading, phonological, and attentional skills of two groups of children with dyslexia before and after they played action or non-action video games for nine 80-minute sessions. The action video gamers were able to read faster without losing accuracy. They also showed gains in other tests of attention.
![Video Games Boost Physical Activity in Children]( "Video Games Boost Physical Activity in Children")
Video games that get users to dance or play a virtual game of soccer or similar blood-pumping games can boost energy expenditures among children, states research.
"These results are very important in order to understand the brain mechanisms underlying dyslexia, but they don't put us in a position to recommend playing video games without any control or supervision," Facoetti said.
Still, there is great hope for early interventions that could be applied in low-resource settings. "Our study paves the way for new remediation programs, based on scientific results, that can reduce the dyslexia symptoms and even prevent dyslexia when applied to children at risk for dyslexia before they learn to read."
And, guess what? Those kids will also be having fun.
Source: Eurekalert
Video Games Boost Physical Activity in Children
Video games that get users to dance or play a virtual game of soccer or similar blood-pumping games can boost energy expenditures among children, states research.
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"These results are very important in order to understand the brain mechanisms underlying dyslexia, but they don't put us in a position to recommend playing video games without any control or supervision," Facoetti said.
Still, there is great hope for early interventions that could be applied in low-resource settings. "Our study paves the way for new remediation programs, based on scientific results, that can reduce the dyslexia symptoms and even prevent dyslexia when applied to children at risk for dyslexia before they learn to read."
And, guess what? Those kids will also be having fun.
Source: Eurekalert
Video Games on Display at New York Art Museum
From March next year, several video games will become an integral part of the collection at New York's Museum of Modern Art.
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 Researchers Identify a Biological Marker of DyslexiaLearning to read proceeds smoothly for most children, but some suffer from dyslexia, a constellation of impairments unrelated to intelligence, hearing or vision that make learning to read a struggle. | Advertisement
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