European study finds action video games can help a child's reading ability

A team of researchers in Italy and Switzerland found that children can achieve long-term reading improvements by playing as little as two hours of action video games per week.

The study, published on Monday in Nature Human Behaviour, divided 150 Italian schoolchildren aged eight to 12 into two groups: one group to play an action video game the researchers created, and another group to play a video game designed to teach kids how to code.

The action game simulated some traditional aspects of ones designed for teenagers or adults but without the violence, and it required the children to solve puzzles and other challenges in a certain time frame.

While the game itself was not designed to teach children how to read, it contained tasks that tested skills needed for strong learning, such as working memory and cognitive flexibility, the researchers noted.

“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,”Daphne Bavelier, a psychology professor at the University of Geneva, said in a news release.