Video games improve reading skills

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Researchers have found an unexpected benefit of video games for brain development in children and adolescents. It turns out that they improve reading skills.

Scientists from the University of Saskatchewan believe that video games have one undeniable advantage that is ignored by today's experts. Traditionally, video games are considered evil for the younger generation and a kind of lazy activity, which also overstrains the eyes. And now it has been established that with the help of video games, children and adolescents improve their reading skills, because during the games themselves they need constant attention and the ability to quickly read large volumes of text that appear on the screen.

Children should not only to read this text that appears in different areas of the screen, but correctly interpret and process it with the brain in order to more successfully cope with the tasks that video game creators set before them. This was confirmed during a study when scientists analyzed the most popular video games to determine the number of objects in the player's peripheral vision to which he must respond.

At the next stage, volunteers with different levels of experience in video games, it was necessary to pass a test that assessed reading skills. During this test, different words appeared on the screen, appearing at 8 possible points. They showed both well-known words to the participants and randomly invented ones, i.e. non-existent ones. Moreover, all volunteers had to read them aloud. It turned out that fans of video games with a lot of peripheral objects on the screen did better on this test, and therefore had the most developed reading skills.