contrast sensitivity

Brain training can work when properly targeted…as in this new vision study

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contrast_sensitivity

Focus­ing the brain on bet­ter vision (The New York Times):

“As adults age, vision dete­ri­o­rates. One com­mon type of decline is in con­trast sen­si­tiv­i­ty, the abil­i­ty to dis­tin­guish gra­da­tions of light to dark, mak­ing it pos­si­ble to dis­cern where one object ends and anoth­er begins.

But new research sug­gests that con­trast sen­si­tiv­i­ty can be improved with brain-train­ing exer­cis­es [Read more…] about Brain train­ing can work when prop­er­ly targeted…as in this new vision study

Gaming Your Way to Better Vision (Research Executive Brief)

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(Edi­tor’s Note: this puzzleis one of the Research Exec­u­tive Briefs that includ­ed in Sharp­Brains’ mar­ket report. We asked lead­ing neu­ro­sci­en­tists to share find­ings and impli­ca­tions from their own recent pub­lished sci­en­tif­ic stud­ies in order to bet­ter fore­cast the devel­op­ment tra­jec­to­ry of emerg­ing appli­ca­tions for cog­ni­tive health and brain fitness.)

Brief pre­pared by: Bjron Hubert-Wal­lan­der, Bjorn & Daphne Bave­li­er, Bave­li­er Brain & Vision Lab, Uni­ver­si­ty of Rochester.

1. Main findings:

Over the past ten years, research con­duct­ed by our lab and oth­ers has shown that play­ing fast-paced, action-packed videogames can lead to sig­nif­i­cant ben­e­fits in how well one pays atten­tion and how well one sees. Specif­i­cal­ly, our stud­ies have shown that train­ing for as lit­tle as ten hours on action video games (like Medal of Hon­or, Call of Duty, and Unre­al Tour­na­ment) can lead to mea­sur­able enhance­ments in our abil­i­ty to spread our atten­tion around the visu­al field, our abil­i­ty to keep track of mul­ti­ple mov­ing objects, and our abil­i­ty to pick out rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion from a rapid sequence of visu­al events. Most recent­ly though, we have shown that action videogame train­ing can also pos­i­tive­ly affect more basic aspects of vision such as our abil­i­ty to resolve small details or see faint patterns.

Pub­lished in the jour­nal Nature Neu­ro­science in 2009, one of our stud­ies com­pared two groups of col­lege-aged males, those who had a his­to­ry of play­ing action videogames and those who had very rarely or had nev­er played videogames at all. By ana­lyz­ing both groups’ per­for­mance on a task designed to [Read more…] about Gam­ing Your Way to Bet­ter Vision (Research Exec­u­tive Brief)