Washington: Computer games are not utter waste of time as is usually thought. A new study has found that the players score off the charts in several standard vision tests.

Furthermore, the visual skills of non-gamers improve dramatically after just 10 hours of playing action games.

These visual skills do translate into real-life activities, believes Daphne Bavelier of the Centre for Visual Science at the University of Rochester in New York. They might help visual performance in sports, for example, and one other study suggests the skills are linked to driving ability in the elderly, according to a report in ‘New Scientist’.

However, kids cannot use this as an excuse to play video games all day long. "This certainly doesn't mean children can learn by playing video games for the whole day," Bavelier said.

The effects of games intrigued Bavelier after her student Shawn Green, a keen gamer, discovered he was extremely adept at the standard vision tests they used in the lab. They found that, compared to non- players, students who had played action games almost daily for at least six months performed far better in certain visual tasks, the report said.

These included identifying the location of a target object on a cluttered computer screen, counting the number of quickly flashed objects and correctly identifying two objects flashed in quick succession. "These tests are nothing like the video games they were playing," Bavelier noted.

She suspects that it is the complex demands placed on the visual system by action games that lead to the improvements. But other aspects of gaming might also play a role: the heightened awareness created by a sense of danger, the sensory overload of sounds, colours and action, or the challenge of beating other players, the report noted.

Beveller would like to tease apart those effects, so that she can create programmes that improve visual performance without exposing patients to the violent images that dominate many of the games. Such programmes might help stroke victims and other patients with damaged visual systems, it added.

ANI