Playing Space Invaders Could Help Kids at Risk For Dyslexia

Playing motion video video games like Space Invaders could assist kids who’re in danger for developmental dyslexia by bettering their potential to listen to and course of sounds, a brand new examine says.

“Action video-games (AVGs) could improve reading efficiency, enhancing not only visual attention but also phonological processing,” which is the way in which sounds are processed to grasp spoken and written language, based on a brand new examine printed in Nature.   

The examine adopted preschoolers who had been in danger, and never in danger, for developmental dyslexia, which the Cleveland Clinic says “interferes with how your brain uses spoken language to ‘decode’ writing.” 

Children had been outlined as “at risk” for dyslexia as a result of they confirmed impairment in areas like phonemic consciousness (understanding how small sounds make up phrases). They had been randomly assigned totally different video video games to play for 45 minutes a day, 4 occasions per week, for six weeks.

The examine discovered that kids who performed the motion online game, Space Invaders Extreme 2, had “a significantly higher improvement” than their friends.

Like the unique Space Invaders, the brand new model has the participant shoot at aliens that slowly strategy the underside of the display screen, and because the examine identified, “this game required accurate spatial and temporal attention to pass to the subsequent level.”

The examine discovered that motion video video games “induce a large, long-lasting and clinically relevant effect on the tuning of phonological representations in pre-readers at risk for [developmental dyslexia], by accelerating the sampling rate of sensory evidence and reducing the sluggish attentional shifting.”

The authors notice that incorporating motion video video games into early interventions might assist kids with different issues as nicely. 

“According to these findings, AVG could be leveraged for preventing multisensory processing difficulties in several neurodevelopmental disorders,” the authors wrote, including that along with kids with developmental dyslexia, “attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder, developmental coordination disorder, and autism spectrum disorder, as well as … typically developing children,” may gain advantage as nicely.

“The present findings indicate that this specific multisensory attentional training positively affects how phonemic awareness develops in pre-readers at risk for developmental dyslexia, paving the way for innovative prevention programs.”