Study Shows Video Games May Help Manage Dyslexia

Playing video games may help people with dyslexia manage their disability, according to a new study from Oxford University.

As NPR reports, the study reveals that video games may help young children with the learning disability by offering them a way to learn how to focus on shifting audio and visual stimuli. Vanessa Harrar, an experimental psychologist and lead author of the study believes dyslexia is an attention disorder that gives patients difficulty shifting from sight and sound or sound to sight stimuli. "It's not just shifting attention from one location to another, but we should also be training shifting attention from sound to visual stimuli and vice versa," Harrar told NPR.

The study took 17 patients with dyslexia and 19 control participants and asked them to press a button as quickly as possible every time they saw a pattern appear on a screen, when they heard a sound, or both. When the dyslexic patients reacted far slower to sounds after seeing the pattern, it stunned scientists and made them rethink what the root cause of the learning disability may be.

While the study did not directly test video games to see if they help dyslexia, Harrar believes that if the asymmetrical delay shown by her study is true for all dyslexic cases then video games may become a helpful tool for trying to manage the condition. After all, most games require players to constantly react to different audio and visual stimuli, so dyslexia sufferers could adapt to these shifting stimuli to have a better grasp of shifting stimuli.

One possible explanation for the results of the study comes from an expert in language and learning disabilities at the University of California named Jeffrey Gilger. "As human beings we prefer visual stimuli," Gilger explained. "When you're trying to listen to someone on TV and the sound doesn't match the mouth moving, it throws you off...You're trying to get the sound to align with the vision, not the vision with the sound."

It will be interesting if scientists are able to find a direct link to managing dyslexia and playing video games in the future. However, scientists have yet to find the cause of dyslexia, so until that cause is established it may be some time before doctors recommend video games as a tool for controlling the condition.

The full study can be found in the Feb. 13 issue of Current Biology.