A study of preschoolers at risk for developmental dyslexia found that playing “Space Invaders Extreme 2” for 45 minutes a day, four times per week, over 1.5 months improved their ability to hear and manipulate individual sounds in words (phonemic awareness). This improvement was greater than those achieved in groups that underwent speech therapy and played other non-action games. The research was published in Npj Science of Learning.
Dyslexia is a learning disorder characterized by difficulties with accurate and/or fluent word recognition, spelling, and decoding abilities. These difficulties are unexpected given the child’s other cognitive abilities and the fact that they have been taught to read and write. It is a neurological condition with a genetic component, so it often runs in families.
Dyslexia is most often identified during the early elementary school years. Children begin formal reading instruction at this time, and reading difficulties experienced by children with dyslexia become apparent. While dyslexia cannot be prevented, early intervention and targeted training can greatly mitigate the risk. This is why researchers are very interested in identifying children at risk for dyslexia as early as possible and developing effective training methods to help them gain reading abilities.
Study author Sara Bertoni and her colleagues note that playing is essential for children’s development. Playing creates an enriched environment that supports cognitive development and learning through the activation of specific combinations of large-scale neural networks in the brain. In this context, action video games might be particularly useful because children are motivated to play them, and the cognitive demands they create put “the brain in a more plastic state.”
These researchers conducted a study to test whether deficits in cognitive capacities known to be needed for reading development could be overcome if children with these deficits played action video games. They focused on three factors known to predict reading development and to be deficient in children with dyslexia: phonemic awareness, phonological working memory, and rapid naming.
Phonemic awareness is the ability to recognize and manipulate individual sounds (phonemes) in spoken words. Phonological working memory refers to the capacity to hold and process sound information temporarily, while rapid naming involves the ability to quickly name a sequence of random letters, numbers, colors, or objects.
The study participants were 120 preschool children, around 5-6 years of age, recruited at the Scientific Institute, IRCCS “Eugenio Medea” (Bosisio Parini, Italy). The study authors had them complete a set of reading-related tasks and found that 79 of them could be classified as at-risk for dyslexia.
They divided the children at risk for dyslexia into four groups. One group would play the action video game “Space Invaders Extreme 2” for 45 minutes, four times per week for the next 1.5 months. The second group played a series of minigames during the same period and with the same intensity. The third group underwent phonological training with a speech therapist (the usual training for dyslexia), consisting of 21 individual 45-minute sessions distributed over 3.7 months. The fourth group was a waitlist group (not undergoing treatment). Children classified as not at risk did not undergo any treatment.
Before and after the treatment, or at two designated time points (for non-treatment groups), participants completed neuropsychological assessments measuring phonemic awareness, phonological working memory, and rapid naming.
Results showed that the group playing “Space Invaders Extreme 2” had significantly higher improvement in phonemic awareness compared to all other groups. This was the case both when groups were considered individually and when the other two treatment groups were combined. A follow-up assessment conducted six months later showed that changes observed in the “Space Invaders Extreme 2″ group persisted.
“Our results showed that AVGs [action video games, Space Invaders 2 in this case] induce a large, long-lasting and clinically relevant effect on the tuning of phonological representations in pre-readers at-risk for DD [developmental dyslexia], by accelerating the sampling rate of sensory evidence and reducing the sluggish attentional shifting,” the researchers concluded.
“According to these findings, AVG could be leveraged for preventing multisensory processing difficulties in several neurodevelopmental disorders characterized by an early dysfunction of attentional deployment, such as dyslexia, attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder, developmental coordination disorder, and autism spectrum disorder, as well as in typically developing children.”
The study sheds light on the potential effect of action video games on developing cognitive skills necessary for attaining reading skills. However, it should be noted that the study utilized just a single action video game and it included children of very specific age. It remains unknown which precisely elements of Space Invaders 2 Extreme facilitated the observed effects. It also remains unknown whether these effects would be achieved in older or younger children than those included in the study.
The paper, “Action video games normalise the phonemic awareness in pre-readers at risk for developmental dyslexia,” was authored by Sara Bertoni, Chiara Andreola, Sara Mascheretti, Sandro Franceschini, Milena Ruffino, Vittoria Trezzi, Massimo Molteni, Maria Enrica Sali, Antonio Salandi, Ombretta Gaggi, Claudio Palazzi, Simone Gori, and Andrea Facoett.