Comment by gnicholas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gnicholas | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

A friend of mine who is a med school professor read the full paper and informed me that:

"There was no statistical significant association between ScreenQ and cognitive score when the analysis accounted for income."

I wonder if the journalists didn't read the full paper, or if they read it but decided to publish these two paragraphs, which give the impression that the physical results are tied to cognitive performance.

> After controlling for age, gender and income, the children with higher ScreenQ scores had lower measures of structural integrity and myelination, especially in tracts involved with language and literacy skills.

The researchers also tested the children cognitively, looking at measures of language and early literacy. The results of the cognitive tests correlated well with the children’s screen exposure; the children with higher screen exposure had poorer expressive language and did worse on tests of language processing speed, like rapidly naming objects.

Journalist: Have you found something useful?

Researcher: Looks like we found it doesn't matter, that much!

Journalist: So it did matter?

Editor: What matters?

Heading: Something mattered

Intern: Finishes the blog

Me: Oh! Let me better click this.

Analytics: Clickbait works!

I wish there really was a real conspiracy rather than just mere incompetence and greed. I suppose what is established is screentime affects eyesight and that's about it.

A lot of people are speculating in the comments on all sorts of causal factors making this connection spurious.

Thank for digging up the article!

The guessing can continue, but the authors and the data in their small study says it pretty clearly: It's the income, guys!

Well the next question is: what is it about income that positively affects cognitive development? I doubt it's the smell or taste of dollar bills; more likely that money affords better parenting techniques, including but not limited to keeping your children's screen time limited.

Yep, the question these studies raise is: if you're doing things "right" in general (reading to your kids, taking them to museums/libraries, talking with them about complex things), does it really matter how much screen time they have?

There seems to be no proof that it matters that much, although I suspect that managing screen addiction becomes important at later ages. It's possible that letting kids have some screen time at younger ages, and teaching them from the get-go about the dangers of over-consumption/addiction, could end up being a very valuable parenting technique in the long run.

The elephant in the room is that there are differences in screentime. If one child grows up on DragonBox, Scratch, and Logo, and another watches cartoons and plays Jewel Candy Crush, it's really not the same.

For sure. I asked my med school professor friend about the differences between different types of screen time, and unfortunately neither he nor his twin brother (himself a neurosurgery professor) was able to say with any certitude which types of activities would be OK, or why certain activities would be more or less harmful.

Obviously the example you gave makes intuitive sense, but there doesn’t seem to be any research or other evidence to support it at this time.

I'm going to play Devil's Advocate and argue that screentime probably does have an impact on one's mental development. Training a child's eyes to focus for long periods of time on a singular object a foot away might not translate well to functioning in the real world. Especially if that singular object is designed and engineered to hook and keep your attention, via Dark Patterns or via Hollywood-style screenwriting with jumpcuts.

That's probabaly the wrong causation. Instead, parents of higher intelligence, education and cultures that values education make more money - and not only pass on their genes, but also are more vigillent or capabale to educate their kids.

Or perhaps they have more time to spend with children, because they don't need to work three jobs, or failing that, can afford to have someone else spend time with their children.

Also, yes, there is a tie between income, education and culture, and it goes both ways. Starting one's life around cultured and educated people does help you grow into someone who has access to a better job, which gives you access to better education and culture, etc.

It's just genetics, parent income is correlated with intelligence.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com