Toddlers who use touchscreens show attention differences
bath.ac.uk
bath.ac.uk
"The study followed them over the next 2.5 years, bringing them into the lab at 18 months and 3.5 years. At the 18-month and 3.5-year visits, toddlers took part in a computer task in which they were trained to search for a red apple amongst a varying number of either blue apples (easy search), or blue apples and red apple slices (difficult search). An eye tracker monitored their gaze and visually rewarded the child when they found the red apple, allowing them to perform the task even though they were too young to verbally describe what they were doing."
No discussion as to any other effect of screen use. Why did this need study? Humans who use a thing more often are better at working with thing?
Better studies on kids with screen time focuses on spatial development: https://digitalcommons.liu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...
"Greater daily digital usage was associated with lower visual spatial performance. Spending even small amounts of time daily with integrated technology was associated with lower WPPSI-IV overall intelligence test scores, and visual spatial scores. Those with the least amount of resources are at the most risk for lower visual spatial abilities"
The key issue often is the parents' role and guidance. Let your kid aimlessly click through YouTube? Or are you fostering their skills and challenge and motivate them to learn something new?
There are mornings when you just want a quiet breakfast while you’re on vacation without an embarrassing meltdown happening and, for better or worse, the most effective way to accomplish that is by giving your kid a movie or show to watch on the iPad for 30 minutes while you eat.
But also, as a parent, I am kind of inclined to hear and accept that my kid being noisy or something is sewhat disrupting other tables. In all honesty, sometimes it disrupts me.
I am significantly less inclined to accomodate randoms whose issue is completely made up problem with phone or tablet during hotel breakfast. I do not care at all. I use tablet to make hotel meal pleasant as opposed to disciplinary issue, for me and for people around other tables. These people don't have problem or pain, they are making up problems in their heads.
It is just that part that makes this complain particularly dumb. Of course public situation is when you are much more likely to use phone. And of course in grand scheme of things it does not matter at all. It is one of millions situations you solve in one way or the other, nit exactly queen visit.
I do not recommend this option.
It's lazy to judge parents just because you see a 30 minute slice of their day
We have almost completely eliminated devices with this tactic because by the time they are done with those two the meal is almost over. And if it isn’t then we also sometimes tell them that they must just wait or engage in conversation with us.
We are lucky that they like painting and playing with playdoh, though.
The game system was a notepad and pen. The game selection included Hangman, Tic-Tac-Toe, and dots-and-boxes.
This is really just nitpicking parental decisions that basically don't matter.
That these things have an effect shows the study above. In addition, you have to evaluate the magnitude of an effect. For example, not every high IQ person who wants to have a well-paid job has one even though a high IQ is known to have a positive impact on reaching that goal. Similarly, not every toddler who uses touchscreens regularly will show increased anti-social behavior, even though that might be a related effect.
First, it is extremely unlikely that sight of touch screen does any harm at all for development of children. The possible small effects are quite unlikely to show up unless the kid is using them a lot, to the exclusion of other activities.
Second, you placed emphasis on during as if hotel meal were the special one place where parent would exclude screen even if the kid is overusing it everywhere else. I hope you are aware, hotel/restaurant is the place where movie is more likely to be used then normal. Restaurant time is not special sacred non-screen time, it is the screen time.
You also wrote:
> I can hardly imagine that this practice is beneficial for the kids development.
I can hardly imagine harm. I can hardly imagine kids to gain on it. In all likelihood, taking in all minuscule effects touch screens have on kids, watching movie during hotel breakfast is completely irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.
It might sound a bit fascist, but factors that is commonly questioned and scorned nowadays such as screen time, sugar intake, lack of outdoors activity and not wearing bike helmets are more common among families with generally lower status. The more upper middle class a family gets, the more important it seems to be to avoid doing harm to our children. Maybe mostly to save face among our peers?
My point is that kids with more screen time may overlap with not being read to as much, not given as much attention to tell their family about their thoughts, not challenged to exercise their ability to focus, and so on. In a very general sense.
I agree that this study doesn't measure anything useful, but in my circles, I have heard of and seen children younger than 2 years old learn to read by playing touchscreen games and children younger than 3 learn the names of states, capitals, and other trivia from playing touchscreen games. Achieving that is possible without touchscreens, but it would require an incredible amount of work from the caretaker.
* Spatial intelligence is positively correlated with socio-economic status.
* Screen (TV + Digital) time is negatively correlated with socio-economic status.
Concluding from this that spatial intelligence is negatively correlated with screen time is dubious. Similar reasoning is used to promote all kinds of class-correlated fashions, e.g. breast feeding.
I think their method does count as a natural experiment and as such does have empirical evidence. From the article:
“Preschoolers from a 2010 study (612 children) were compared to preschoolers from a 2014 study (492 children) because of the digital explosion into everyday life that occurred between the two time periods. Television viewing patterns have remained similar over time, but technological device usage has increased.”
> If it were true that usage of touchscreens cause lower intelligence test scores, we would have seen this show up as a population-wide reduction in scores as touchscreens became widely available.
Exposure in formative years is vastly different than adult exposure. The affected cohort in the study is now only in middle school and population wide effects will have a lagged appearance.
Strictly speaking, the discussed research of toddlers using touchscreens is not an experiment also. In experimental setup researcher must control independant variable (touchscreen use). For this research it would mean to get a group of toddlers, split them randomly into two groups, give touchscreens to one group and some "placebo" to other. Researchers didn't do that, they split toddlers into two groups on the ground of the existing touchscreen use. So what they did is called a "correlational research", not an "experiment".
Correlation doesn't allow to speak about casuality. Maybe children ability to a visual search drive them to use touchscreens. Maybe touchscreens teach them to search. Maybe some other factor (like parenting style, or family income) teach them to love touchscreens and to effectively search for visual stimuli.
To be frank, I do not like this reseach much. It is correlational reseach, and there were no attempts to exclude interfering variables: if toddler used touchscreen more, than he/she would be better at tasks on a screen, wouldn't he/she?
I don't put much stock in intelligence assessments. There's no real standards around the exams. My school placed you in cohorts based on IQ, and it was pretty obvious that the scoring system was measuring something other than your innate ability. My dad worked in civil service for many years, where promotions and appointments are governed by exams that were a combination of grammar tests and proxies for IQ exams. I didn't see any evidence that those assessments did anything other than reducing patronage and making it harder for non-native speakers to move up the ladder.
It could very much be that kids that grew on TV have some other thought patterns that caused the reality we live in today. It's extremely confounded on so many things. We cant really know for sure anything about it.
The fact that some knowledge and intelligence is not accessible to science (today) doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Just that we don't have the tools to study it, yet.
I doubt it. We reward some behaviors differently in 2020 vs 1980, and have different inputs from an information perspective. But people are wired the same way. The "racist uncle" stereotype of 2020 was "Archie Bunker" in 1980.
And no, high iq is not particularly useful in other areas, not when I don't have the ability to work hard on anything except what I'm actually interested in. So formal education was painful.
That's not what the study is about. The study was about a particular effect, and they published their conclusions. The need for such a study can be debated but there is a difference between "common sense" and a proper peer-reviewed study. And to be published by what looks like a serious journal, I guess it wasn't so obvious to experts.
I am fed up with articles that proves a controversial point and then the reporter has to add a "but...". Maybe useful on prime time TV, so that people who are unfamiliar with scientific work don't get the wrong idea, but this is a university, and people reading this are supposed to be familiar with the scientific process.
Maybe some other group will later use the results of all these study and say something like "even though kids with more screen time are better at video games[citation], there is no significant improvement in related activities, we also noticed a decrease in...". But that's another study.
"What we need to know next is whether this attention difference is advantageous or detrimental to their everyday life."
A lot of the comments on HN imply that the researches found a negative effect, when they did not conclude that.
The answer is probably the usual: money.
Someone got a "use it or lose it" budget.
Sorry for being silly in my reply, but the reason we have studies confirming simple “obvious” to you correlations is that we can’t just rely on random peoples intuition without proof. Even simple things need to be studied and sometimes our expectations are broken and we discover that no, everything isn’t made up of combinations of earth, water, fire and wind, even though that was what was “obvious” to the smartest elders of all the lands.
For clarity to your point; I think it would be hard to argue that among kids tested playing piano that those who had an interest and practiced more would sound better statistically. Your toddler may not be davinvi, but they should end up with better fine motor control and maybe learn to enjoy expressing themselves in that medium.
Overall I'd say it's pretty hard to stay conservative about exposing them to screens. They're all over the place now, if I don't give them one they'll want mine. Plus their friends see them everywhere, too. I'm trying to at least steer the screen time towards useful things like math and coding, but it's not always easy.
I have this scary feeling that how you spent your screen time as a kid of this generation (current children) is going to be one of the major determinants of your life. You can use the relatively new power of having all the world's knowledge at your fingertips, or you can use your time looking at cat pictures. The difference is going to magnify the natural differences that occured in previous generations, as the kids who want to learn about stuff can teach themselves while there's never been a better way to waste time for kids who are inclined that way.
eh I'm in my 30s and am angry at car dashboards that clearly have GUI buttons on them but can only be used by the corresponding physical button on the side, or in some random other place nearby. Be nice if they did both if use while driving and not looking at that interface is the concern.
I want to sink all of those cars. Like, in the ocean.
You can feel physical buttons. If the UI has a consistent menu system and a reset mechanism (e.g. a home button), you can navigate it blind. If it has different input modalities (switches, dials, toggles of different shapes and sizes) for different functions, even better.
Edit: Of course I think it's been well proven that most car companies tend to write bad UIs so I don't imagine this will work as well as I envision it.
the most annoying thing that I ran into was a ford running an early version of Microsoft's car dashboard (I think it was sync?) - when a popup came up in front of the speedometer with an "ok" button to dismiss it. it was on the freeway, and it wasn't until I made it to campus that I was able to get it to go away by powering down and powering up the car (rebooting it). it wasn't a touchscreen, so no idea why anyone thought a dialog box was needed, and it was cut off, so I still don't know what it wanted me to do.
I've talked to teachers who said that they've started seeing young children with picture books doing the zoom in/out pinching motion on pages.
Early versions of iOS were rife with skeuomorphism. Is it sad that iBooks displayed your books on a wooden shelf and played page-turn animations that look like paper, or is it just an application of existing skills and knowledge to a different technology?
Paper books are obsolete. Some people think that they aren't obsolete because they're using tiny low-res monitors or don't know how to use a document manager or haven't used an Apple Pencil, but digital text is just better. I don't care whether young people know what to do with a paper book, but I do care that they know how to interact effectively with text. I'm far more perturbed that schools waste countless person-hours teaching cursive handwriting, but most don't teach typing.
Restoring/downloading a new copy of a partial damaged digital book takes less time than it took me to type up this reply.
I might be biased by growing up with paper, but writing on my iPad with an Apple Pencil makes me feel very different things compared to writing in my notebook. Paper is physical. I can rip paper, I can spread my paper notes on the floor, I can put them away and find them 30 years later etc.
To me comparing writing on paper and writing on an iPad feels like comparing walking to travelling with an electric scooter. Yes, both take you from place A to place B, but they have very different implications and are very different experiences.
Say you give a child a maraca, and s/he learns that s/he can shake the maraca to make noise. Then you hand a child a block, s/he is going to shake the block to see if it makes noise. The interesting bit and teachable moment is that these things have different features and properties and we interact with them differently, and thus we use them for different things. How does a touchscreen fall outside of that?
I say this as a recent parent who is hesitant to introduce screens and approaching the subject carefully.
Also, that video is hilarious, and it's clearly for the best that he's been pulled over.
Children (and adults) learn from their interactions with items, be it technology or not. Attempting to use "touchscreen behaviors" on something that isn't a touch interface is just another learning moment. They're attempting to use their knowledge and experiences to explore the world around them, as each generation did before us.
We're just more connected than we ever were, so this behavior is now more noticeable due to that connectivity and sharing.
I remember the laugh of a guy in 2008 when I scrolled with my fingers on his blackberry's screen. Now I own a Blackberry KeyOne and it is a reality.
IMO, kids need to be taught self-control and have the ability to entertain themselves before screens are introduced.
Toddler age is definitely too early, I am in the opinion that as little as necessary until it starts to be required in school.
My 2nd grader knows that screens are useful and has seen limited use, wikipedia, video calls, but he is always accompanied by me. And he has no reliance on them.
Parenting is more work today than it used to be. In the past you sent out your kids to the local neighborhood all day, they came back to fix boo-boos and food and then you tucked them in to sleep. Sometimes you had family game nights or similar or everyone would watch TV / listen to the radio together.
Now they must have adult eyes on them 24/7 lest you get CPS called on you.
He subscribes to Minecraft and Fortnite Youtubers all the time.
Periodically I will unsubscribe him to *most of those video game channels. And in turn, subscribe him to a few Science channels. He's recently gotten into soccer, so I subscribed him to a couple of beginner-howto soccer channels as well.
His Youtube recommendations are now more science oriented and he seems to enjoy them. He doesn't seem to notice, yet.
You can manage your channel subscriptions here:
Chess is a game that has a defined purpose. It has a beginning, a middle game and an endgame. One can learn openings, strategies, concentration etc. That translates to some interesting thinking tools that could be used outside of chess.
Minecraft players usually wonder around and kick blocks and collect trinkets without a specific aim. Sure, some users build stuff which I find as cool. And leisurely playing isn't a bad thing.
I have a problem with sinking too much time into just computer games or even more specifically with only one game and even worse, not playing the game but passively watch others play on youtube or twitch. Kids learn things all the time but if they're stuck in a virtual reality that starts to have diminishing returns fast.
I've spent a lot of time playing computer games, they sparked a love of history, geography, technology, new kinds of music, they've informed my taste and sense of humor, and helped me be more circumspect when it comes to life "strategy". Without the love of history, I never would have gotten into chess, either, but it is something I enjoy. At any given time, it would have looked an awful lot like sinking countless hours into one game.
Currently, jumping on a Discord call and playing with friends is an excellent substitution for social visit.
Everyone has hobbies, and personally, I don't think the specific hobby matters as much as pursuing something with the possibility of intellectual growth.
Presumably the nephew is still a child, and presumably he will move on to other things as he gets older.
I'll eat my words if he ends up a 60 year old who regrets spending his life playing Minecraft. Then again, if he is a 60 year old who was productive and happy and spent his free time playing Minecraft without regret, that would also be fine, no?
I had a cat like that once. he had been playing a cat game on the iPad and managed to get pretty good at it. later, I was doing a project that involved several small touch screens. it became difficult to work on the project when he was around, as he saw images on the screen and started pawing them, trying to get them to move and make sound.
not just kids. cats as well.
To quote the article, "...We are currently unable to conclude that the touchscreen use caused the differences in attention".
"Dr Ana Maria Portugal, main researcher on the project points out “We are currently unable to conclude that the touchscreen use caused the differences in attention as it may also be that children who are generally more attracted to bright, colourful features seek out touchscreen devices more than those who are not.”"
That children who don't use tablets have shorter attention spans and worst social skills. The "natural is better" argument is not research based. Society has long preached that things like reading books is great for kids but it's entirely unnatural just like tablets.
Generally research in this area has been extremely biased against electronics. You also have to control for the type of activities they are doing on the tablet.
For example the mental stimulation when playing an educational Daniel Tiger game is completely different than watching a toy sales driven TV show like Transformers. Both can be done on a tablet though.
Wasn't always the case, Plato felt it would dull your memory.
"They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks."
What Plato missed was that our ability to do higher order reasoning and synthesis has grown by leaps with books and now the internet. That's a pretty good trade-off for losing some memory.
On the other hand I don't think any great leaps are required to be wary of the effects of screen time. Even as an adult, if I get into the habit of scrolling through newsfeeds, I notice a strong effect of being distracted and seeking stimulus when doing work. My brain has been trained for quick hits of novelty.
In general, there's a night-and-day difference between activities that are easy and tempting vs. challenging but rewarding. I'm sure there are some great educational games on the iPad, but realistically the vast majority of screen time falls into the easy and tempting category.
Does there need to be a cost? From my experience, it's just like most activities you do with your children.
You can use it as babysitter or you can use it as a learning tool by participating and engaging with your child.
Here's how I've done it and he's doing great:
- We mostly use the tablet together, especially when we try a new app.
- I avoid the crack-head apps. The ones with bells, whistles, popups, and other toxic rewards for simple actives. It's fine to rewards like that for something challenging.
- We talk about what he's doing. For example, why he chooses certain colors or why he likes the features. Anything to start a conversation.
- Moderation. 15-30 minutes once every few days.
- Reference what he learned from the app during real-life activities. For example, one app he likes is a virtual dog washing app. He uses soap, a brush, water, etc. When we're playing together, we pretend to clean his stuffed animals just like he did in the app.
What's funny is that everyone just assumes the screen time is bad, and that our kids are naturally very smart (with the implicit suggestion that they'd know more without screen time). That may be true, but it isn't borne out by observation in our case.
We've found a lot of parenting is like that - people are pretty sure about what's good and bad, and the child's behavior/response one way or the other is either expected or a fluke, depending on what confirms assumptions about what's good and bad.
Our oldest is only 7, but we have 4 and we've noticed no ill effects from screen time, the kids are all social, they love to go to the park and play with friends (which we don't get to do nearly enough now...), to go for walks and ride bikes, in short they all seem well within the bounds of "normal" development for their ages.
>> “What we need to know next is whether this attention difference is advantageous or detrimental to their everyday life.”
Why the fuck would you have infants with 'levels of touchscreen usage' at 12 month?
Consider any sort of child-rearing decision. In this case letting your toddler use an iPad or not. Is it within the realm of normal variation you'd find between families? In this case, yes: some families let kids have a lot of screen time, and some families strictly limit screen time.
Well then, it almost certainly will have essentially zero impact on long-term adult outcomes. It may have a transitory short-term impact. Analogously, reading to kids may lead to learning to read at an earlier age. But twin studies tell us that by adulthood, the effect regresses to the mean. I.e. reading to kids a lot won't give them higher reading comprehension when they grow up.
First off, this is brilliant use of eye tracking. I could see eye tracking being so useful for learning, such as tracking attention, knowing when to need a break, etc. Eye tracking is super useful in user testing - for example I was watching some user testing at a major corporation and we used eye tracking. We instructed the user to minimize the app and then open it again, and we noticed that when it was in the systray, people really got confused. It was really easy to see because we could see where their eyes were scanning. Using eye tracking for people who can't speak (for any reason, maybe physical or mental injury or disability, and here age / language barrier) could be huge.
The attention differences are certainly interesting, although I wonder how much of it might be training to use touchscreens, or the idea of a screen that it might change at any time, without related motion. This is completely unnatural, as you would normally think something will change when something walks over to it, or moves slightly. Fixed objects tend to fade more into the background of our mental landscape, which is the basis of a lot of sleight of hand. Like removing something when you can't see it. It'd be interesting to compare against something that doesn't change when you interact with it, like television screens. (is it the touch part, or the screen part?)
I also wonder how touchscreens are sometimes differently interpreted by animals, kind of like mirrors are. For example, some cats seem to think that the little toy apps are under them, or inside of them, or are just generally confused. It's really quite fascinating.
'Dr Ana Maria Portugal, main researcher on the project points out “We are currently unable to conclude that the touchscreen use caused the differences in attention as it may also be that children who are generally more attracted to bright, colourful features seek out touchscreen devices more than those who are not.”'
This is an important confounding factor. My opinion is that toddlers often spend time with media that are brighter and more colorful than the surrounding environment, e.g. animated videos for children or educational apps for young children. A better study would take that into account.
It just goes to show that these recommendations are not really based on science. It’s more like they are based on guesses by reasonable people when the science isn’t really that confident one way or the other. My personal suspicion is that some forms of screen time, like video calls with family or educational apps, are good for kids. And some forms, like watching TV, are bad for them.
That said, obviously the recommendations are not fully science based because the science is not clear-cut. One study will tell you about the spatial skills and reaction ability of ego shooters, another of the negative sides such as normalisation of violence, reduced quality of sleep, etc.
That isn’t surprising to me: there are no inherent properties attached to a touch screen that would affect attention. But there are plenty of fast paced games and videos that could, and those tend to be viewed through touch screens. So I still wonder about that (though it’s not all that different to watching too much TV, something people have discussed for decades now)
Before anyone takes this study and says "so screen time has positive influence" and gives it to their 1 year-old, I'd like to give an anecdote from my own experience. I grew up in the 80s and my family was one of the earliest to own an NES. According to my parents, I started playing the NES when I was 4 or 5. I have some of the fastest reflexes (when it comes to video games or similar activities) of any friends I know; and I played in fighting games tournaments in college. This is a genre of competitive games where millisecond-reflexes can determine the outcome of the game. (of course, I was a low tier tournament player and there are tons of world class players way better and faster than me)
I'd say my takeaway is that sure, maybe that kind of "screen training" helps with reflexes and attention, but you don't have to start that early. If you start at 5 years old instead of 1 year old, you might just get as much of the benefits, without the down sides of vision problems etc. that comes with having screen time too early.
Screen time is leading to more than attention differences, it appears it leads to physiological differences as well.
This correlates with my own experience, especially as I transitioned to defensive driving in my mid 20s. I am always keenly aware of what nearby cars are doing, especially on the highway, and have become great at anticipating driver stupidity. Things like a slight steering wiggle before trying to cut across multiple lanes to make an exist. I've averted countless accidents with this heightened awareness.
And on the other hand, there were multiple kids in high school who would ended up having 2-3 accidents in their first year of driving. Obviously there are tons of factors involved but I like to think that my devotion to CS and TFC weren't a complete waste of time.
Maybe because we're from generation(s) where screen is unnatural (except TV) and we want our kids to have the same positive, "natural", experience like ours.
But I wonder a few generations forward, maybe the future parents will not have the same aversion like ours since they grew up with screens?
(Regardless of the answer, I'm not letting my kids stare screens all day, even though that's what I do daily and how I earn my living)
I think they should find this out and then give the public a ring. Until then, feels like clickbait.
Most content kids consume on tablets is essentially junk food for the brain. Also, humans aren't meant to stare at screens all day long...the unknown impacts of extended screen use aren't worth it in exchange for a few lackluster benefits. Not to mention eliminating boredom from kids lives and therefore possibly cultivating a generation of extreme ADHD.
My daughter has to take this standardized map test in Connecticut. It is all computer based. If you are not comfortable using the computer, you do not do well on the test.
The teacher uses this online problems site IXL to help them get use to answering the questions on the computer. This was also really helpful when everyone had to do school remotely.
Th
(No comment on IXL's effectiveness; I have absolutely no idea whether it helped or hindered or what.)
There is really no shortcut for learning to read. You have to put in the time with your kids.
Research seems poorly directed, like lots of ad hoc studies without cooperation and planning for how it will be used for the sector overall.
Not a research scientist; probably a very naive view. Maybe there's more higher level cooperation/symbiosis/planning/whatever than I perceive?
What is the effect of touchscreen usage by toddlers on their peripheral vision?