Children with dyslexia shouldn’t be discouraged from the extra time they spend racing cars and blasting aliens in their most adventure-filled video games.

That’s according to the latest report from Italian researchers.

Highlighted in Current Biology and reported by The New York Times, a new study shows that video games have a positive impact on dyslexic youngsters when it comes to learning and comprehension.

The small study… involved two groups of 10 dyslexic children. One group played action video games for nine sessions of 80 minutes each, while the other followed the same routine with nonaction games. The researchers bought the games in retail stores and have no financial interest in any video game company.

The researchers say that both groups of kids were similar in terms of age, I.Q., reading speed, error rates and phonological skills.

Following the video gaming exercises, researchers looked into the attention and reading skills of the children. The findings are telling: kids who played action games “scored significantly higher” than those who played the “nonaction games.”

“The correlation between attention improvement and reading improvement was very high,” said Simone Gori, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Padua and one of the report’s co-authors. “The change in attentional abilities translates into better reading ability.”