Improving reading skills through action video games

 Skies of Manawak: a screenshot of the action-like, flying mini-game. (c) UNIGE / D.Bavelier -  An Italian-Swiss team demonstrates children reading skills can be improved through a novel child-friendly action video game. What if video games, instead of being an obstacle to literacy, could actually help children improve their reading abilities? A team from the University of Geneva has joined forces with scientists from the University of Trento in Italy to test an action video game for children, which would enhance reading skills. The results, published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour , demonstrate improved reading abilities after just twelve hours of training. Notably, these gains persist over time, to the point that language school grades are seen to improve more than a year after the end of training. Decoding letters into sound is a key point in learning to read but is not enough to master it. "Reading calls upon several other essential mechanisms that we don't necessarily think about, such as knowing how to move our eyes on the page or how to use our working memory to link words together in a coherent sentence," points out Daphné Bavelier, a professor in the Psychology Section of the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences (FPSE) at the University of Geneva. "These other skills, such as vision, the deployment of attention, working memory, and cognitive flexibility, are known to be improved by action video games", explains Angela Pasqualotto, first author of this study, which is based on her PhD thesis at the Department of Psychology and Cognitive Science of the University of Trento under the direction of Professors Venuti and De Angeli.