Solution to Dyslexia? Let Your Children Play Action Video Games

Want your child to read better? Let them play video games. A new study shows that dyslexic children who spent time playing action video games allowed them to read better.

The study, published in the journal Current Biology, builds off of earlier work conducted by the same team that links dyslexia to early problems with visual attention rather than language skills. They used two groups of children in order to conduct their experiment, testing their reading, phonological and attention skills. They then allowed the children to play either action or non-action video games for nine 80-minute sessions. After each session, the researchers tested the children's skills again.

Surprisingly, the researchers found that the action video gamers were actually able to read faster without losing accuracy. These children also showed gains in other tests of attention.

Currently, there's no approved method to treat dyslexia, a condition that makes reading extremely difficult for about one out of every ten children. But these findings show that action video games could be part of the solution. In fact, the researchers found that 12 hours of video game play did more for reading skills than is normally achieved with a year of spontaneous reading development or demanding, traditional reading treatments.

"Action video games enhance many aspects of visual attention, mainly improving the extraction of information form the environment," said Andrea Facoetti, one of the researchers, in a press release. "Dyslexic children learned to orient and focus their attention more efficiently to extract the relevant information of a written word more rapidly."

That's not to say that children should play video games unsupervised. Researchers were quick to note that children shouldn't be allowed to play games without any kind of control. This study doesn't only give insight into treatment, though. It also provides further proof that dyslexia may be an issue with visual attention skills rather than language skills.