Action Video Games Improve Reading Skills of Dyslexic Children

Dyslexic children benefit out of playing video games. According to a new study, action video games improve the reading skills of dyslexic children. Researchers also found visual attention deficit as the main culprit behind the reading difficulties experienced by dyslexic children.

Dyslexia or developmental reading disorder is a learning disability that affects a person's ability to read, write and spell words and sentences.

The brain-based learning disability, which impairs a person's fluency or comprehension accuracy in reading, affects nearly 5 percent of school-age children in the country.

The current study re-confirms a study conducted by the same researchers earlier which had found that children with dyslexia actually struggle with visual attention rather than language problems.

"Action video games enhance many aspects of visual attention, mainly improving the extraction of information from the environment," Andrea Facoetti of the University of Padua and the Scientific Institute Medea of Bosisio Parini in Italy, said in a news release. "Dyslexic children learned to orient and focus their attention more efficiently to extract the relevant information of a written word more rapidly."

For the study, two groups of children with dyslexia played video games (both action and non-action) for 80-minutes. Facoetti and colleagues recorded the reading, phonological and attention skills of the participants before and after the games. Children who played action video games showed improvement by reading more accurately and also performed better in tests related to attention skills.

"These results are very important in order to understand the brain mechanisms underlying dyslexia, but they don't put us in a position to recommend playing video games without any control or supervision," Facoetti said.

The results of the study have been published in the Cell Press journal Current Biology.

Efforts to help children affected with dyslexia have been going on from a long time. A study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in June last year found that leaving wider space between letters helps dyslexic children read faster with fewer mistakes.

Similar to the current study, another study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in September 2012 showed listening devices like FM systems helping these kids improve their phonological awareness and reading skills.