Video games can help some people read

An estimated 5 to 10 percent of people suffer some degree of dyslexia. This learning disability is a lifelong condition that can make it hard to spell and recognize words. But a new study finds that action video games may boost the ability of the brain to improve its focus. That’s good, since trouble focusing is a common in people with dyslexia.

Compared with good readers, people with dyslexia have a hard time switching from focusing on what they see to what they hear.

In the new trial, researchers in England and Spain asked volunteers to press a button as quickly as possible whenever they got a cue. Sometimes that cue would be a sound. Other times it was a dim flash. It might even be a combination of both.

People with dyslexia responded more slowly when a visual cue flashed before a sound than did people with no reading problems. These data support the idea that people with dyslexia have an impaired ability to pay attention to visual cues, the researchers conclude. Vanessa Harrar of the University of Oxford and her co-workers shared their findings February 13 in Current Biology, a research journal.

Playing action video games forces people to constantly shift their attention. As such, such games “are potentially an excellent method” for training the brains of dyslexics in skills “critical for advanced learning,” Harrar’s group says. The reason? These games train people to process sensory changes faster.

Power Words

dyslexia  A learning disability that makes it hard for an individual to spell, quickly recognized combinations of written letters as particular words, and trouble figuring out the sound that should be associated with a particular combination of letters.