spot on the screen."

The researchers assessed each player's peripheral vision using a large protractor held to their eye level and by showing them coloured visual clues at different angles within a 180° radius.

Mr Ramirez Gomez said: "We evaluated the participants' peripheral visual capabilities before and after the games to test for skills development. We found a significant improvement in object recognition in the participants' peripheral vision after playing the games."

Even just one gaming session resulted in improvements in the players' peripheral awareness. The study continued over two weeks and the participants continued to show improvements in their peripheral vision throughout the duration of the research.

The participants did not play the games over the weekends during the study. This created a gap of three days between playing the gamesand researchers taking a measurement of the players' peripheral vision. There was no noticeable decline in performance over this gap, suggesting improvements in peripheral vision can be lasting, at least in the short-term.

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The study is outlined in the paper 'SuperVision: Playing with Gaze Aversion and Peripheral Vision', which was presented at the ACM CHI2019 academic conference recently held in Glasgow.

The research authors are Argenis Ramirez Gomez and Hans Gellersen of Lancaster University's School of Computing and Communications.