For children with dyslexia, learning to read can be a nightmare: to them, it's a jumble of words, letters, and sounds that is impossible to make sense of. Studies show that dyslexia is a disorder of the brain (rather than of the visual system), but since scientists still don’t know the root cause, there’s no simple way to combat the disorder. Traditional treatments and therapies for the dyslexia are time-consuming, expensive, and don’t necessarily bring huge improvements.

One of the hallmarks of dyslexia is what researchers call "attentional dysfunction;" this deficit makes it hard for dyslexics to focus their attention and pick out important information in a cluttered environment. To attack this deficit head-on, a group of Italian researchers wondered whether children with dyslexia would benefit from intense immersion in an activity that forced them to practice these skills. Specifically, would playing active video games help dyslexic kids learn to focus their attention, making it easier for them to learn to read?

The answer was a resounding yes, according to the research detailed in Current Biology this week.

During the study, twenty dyslexic children played a Wii game called Rayman Raving Rabbids for a total of 12 hours over nine days. The game contains several mini-games; half of the kids were assigned to play what the researchers called “active” mini-games, while the other half played “non-active” mini-games. Active games were faster than non-active games, included more sensory stimuli, and required more dynamic input from the players. Essentially, the active mini-games required kids to focus their attention and respond quickly in order to do well.

Both before and after the nine days of game-playing, the researchers tested the kids on several different tasks such as reading speed and accuracy, word recognition, and their ability to pay attention to multiple types of input (such as sight and sound) at once.

Before playing the games, the two groups were roughly equivalent in these tasks. But after 12 hours of the game, the kids that had played the active mini-games showed significant improvements in reading ability; they read faster and more accurately, and they recognized more words than they had before the treatment. Meanwhile, the children that had played non-active mini-games didn’t do any better on the tasks than they had before playing.

The improvements these children made in the reading tasks were substantial; kids made more reading progress after nine days of active game-playing than an average dyslexic child makes during a year of traditional education therapy. Additionally, the improvements were relatively long-lasting. Even two (video game-free) months later, the kids did just as well on a word recognition test as they had immediately after the nine-day treatment.

Just as reading does, the active games required the kids to balance several different types of sensory input while still focusing on a larger goal. The researchers believe that playing active games may help improve the efficiency of certain brain pathways, such as those that integrate visual information with motor responses.

But there’s a long way to go before video games become a well-accepted treatment for dyslexic children, and nobody’s recommending that kids—dyslexic or not—should spend hours on end playing the Wii. However, this study is convincing evidence that improving visual attention in non-traditional ways may help reduce the incidence of dyslexia and other reading disorders. And for the millions of kids out there that are struggling to learn to read, that’s welcome news.

Current Biology, 2013. DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2013.01.044 (About DOIs).