Feb 14, 2014 04:13 PM EST By Jaleesa Baulkman, UniversityHerald Reporter

Playing action video games may help people with dyslexia improve their learning skills, according to a recent study Fox News reported.

A well-documented side effect of dyslexia, a learning disability in reading, writing and spelling, is difficulty processing and switching between visual and audio sensory cues, such as "looking at an image and then shifting attention to a sudden noise," Fox News reported.  

"Imagine you are having a conversation with someone when suddenly you hear your name uttered behind you," study author Vanessa Harrar of the University of Oxford in England, said in a statement. ""Your attention shifts from the person you are talking to -- the visual -- to the sound behind you,"

Harrar said that is an example of cross-sensory shift of attention. Researchers from the University of Oxford found that playing action video games could help people with dyslexia overcome their inability to shift between audio and video cues rapidly.

For the study, researchers tested the reaction times of 34 volunteers by asking them to press a button each time they heard a sound, saw a dim flash or experienced both together during the experiment.  Half the group had dyslexia and half did not.

They observed that people with dyslexia were as fast as those who did not have the disability when they saw only a picture or heard only a sound, but were slower to respond when a sound cue followed a visual cue, the Examiner reported.

"We already knew that dyslexics have difficulty shifting from one place or another. [In previous research] having headphones in the ears, but seeing the visual on a screen was a confound. This is the first to really control location so everything is exactly perceived as coming from the same place," Harrar told Fox News.

 Harrar and colleagues said programs to help people with the learning disability should take their study into account. In reading, letters are first seen and then heard, researchers said.

Researchers also said they believe video games might help people with dyslexia improve their reading and writing skills.

"We propose that training people with dyslexia to shift attention quickly from visual to auditory stimuli and back-such as with a video game, where attention is constantly shifting focus-might also improve literacy," Harrar said. "Action video games have been shown to improve multitasking skills and might also be beneficial in improving the speed with which people with dyslexia shift attention from one task, or sense, to another."

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