Now before you get too excited from the headline, read the entire article first.

Under the guidance of Daphne Bavelier, researchers at the University of Rochester in New York have been studying the effects of video games on eyesight. 

More specifically, they plop subjects in front of various games and monitor their brain activity.  What Bavelier and her team discovered is that video game training can improve an individual's ability to detect subtle differences in shades of grey, which can help people who struggle with nighttime driving.

"Normally, improving contrast sensitivity means getting glasses or eye surgery -- somehow changing the optics of the eye," Bavelier explained.  "But we've found that action video games train the brain to process the existing visual information more efficiently, and the improvements last for months after game play stopped."

For the study, the research team divided 22 students into two groups.  One group played Call of Duty 2 and Unreal Tournament 2004 while the second played The Sims 2.  Both groups played their respective games for 50 hours over the course of nine weeks, and by the end of that period, the group playing more action-oriented games were showing an average of 43 percent improvement in their ability to discern various shades of grey. 

The Sims group showed no such improvement.

"When people play action games, they're changing the brain's pathway responsible for visual processing," said Bavelier, whose study appears in the monthly journal Nature Neuroscience.  "These games push the human visual system to the limits and the brain adapts to it."

According to Bavelier, these findings suggest that such video games may be a useful supplement to existing eye-correction techniques.