The impact of digital media on children’s intelligence

They state

> Socializing via social media, text, and video chat

Is socializing via social media mean talking in a chat? Or does scrolling your instagram feed and liking your friend's posts count as socializing?

Or scrolling Twitter and liking/replying to your friend's tweets? That could be considered socializing too?

Intelligence does not directly correlate with either success in life or happiness (I believe intelligence is negatively correlated with happiness).

”Scientific Reports is an open access journal. To publish in Scientific Reports, all authors are required to pay an article-processing charge (APC) of $1,495.”

Video games, like all things, should not all be treated equal. I could certainly see problem solving skills developing from world building or highly complex games (Civ, PoE, etc.). In fact, most (but not all) highly successful games have depth, which requires time investment and problem solving. The difference in games can be as varied as comparing a marketing pamphlet to Asimov's novels.

I don't dispute your take on the quality of the research though. I would even go further and speculate it would be really really hard to come up with meaningful tests due to game variance. So most anything on the subject is likely fluff.

You can say that for almost every human study that's not drug based, or very short-term.

Maybe it's the games you play (CoD) that make imagine that game-playing develops no reasoning skills.

Play something else (starcraft, for example).

Do we think this study would be improved if it did not control for genetics at all?

You know there are more video games styles than FPS right? Strategy games teach patience and discipline, EVE online teaches economics, even the much dismissed 'mindless' fps teach teamwork.

I think it's likely that at least some games do increase intelligence relative to other activities (i.e. mindlessly watching tv) but less so than others like reading.

The Porsche comment is snide, but actually exposes a similar error in your critique. Sure, a tax return-derived measure of income would be superior to measuring if someone owned a luxury car. But, if you found yourself in a situation where all you had to go on for measuring economic wellbeing was (luxury) car ownership, your analysis is likely to improve by including it rather than excluding it, unless the measure itself had serious other issues with its accuracy.

Likewise, for SES, it is an imperfect measure, but it is the best we have for measuring social position in a concise way.

Having worked in research and universities for a while, the type of critique presented in this post is one you often see of new graduate students. They are able to tear down problems with research very well, but tend to overlook whether the study itself was still informative, or whether the opposite finding is likely to be true.

For example, suppose we wanted to know if video games or watching videos on the internet are making you dumber. A study like this may not convince you it's making you smarter, but it presents decent evidence they're not making you dumber. You can point out how the measures aren't perfect, but that is far from saying the opposite is true or the observed trends are completely spurious.

Obviously though the benefits aren't there if people just mindlessly play the same game all day.

As far as scientific reports goes its a fine journal, its run by nature. It's not on the same planet as the predatory journals that spam inboxes. I worry that people will read your comment, assume you speak from authority, and discount any work they might see coming from that journal when we both know that good science can be found in scientific reports, and that impact factor is more strongly correlated with "sexy" or expensive science than good science anyhow.

*Not really a problem if you correctly believe science should be more than publishing sexy results.

"A latchkey kid, or latchkey child, is a child who returns to an empty home after school or a child who is often left at home with no supervision because their parents are away at work."

One of the things he mentions is that TV is passive, and puts you in an alpha state where your brain stops trying to respond because there’s no point in responding.

My partner and I do watch a few hours of TV every night now. But we don’t do this “alpha” thing, at least not exclusively. We pause frequently to comment on or joke about what we’re seeing. To the point that I think sometimes a 30 minute show will take us an hour to get through.

The way it works is one of holds the remote and pauses whenever they want to, and if the other wants to pause they just say “pause!”

I wonder how that changes Mander’s analysis. For us it make TV a pretty fun interactive experience.

And this way of watching was largely impossible when Mander did his work, because you simply couldn’t pause TV. Although you could pause a VCR or DVD.

I’m curious how widespread pausing is. I certainly feel that even solo TV watching is a more interactive experience than TV watching was when I was a kid. Alone, I’ll pause to Wikipedia things or to go find related media.

I believe this research is severely lacking.

Some people try to bring this modification friendly things back, with BBC Microbit, RasPi and so on. But in the end you need to be motivated - and playing better was huge motivation for me!

The docs were so sparse and the communities so small that it really was a much different experience than today. I have fond memories of it, but that might just be me looking back with rose colored glasses.

I would have killed for stack overflow though! But there is a sense of self directed mastery that you don't get when you are so much more familiar with how fast the bodies of knowledge are.

The closest I get to that these days is trying to hack code on a plane :)

So I wouldn't call games "not addictive". If anything, watching something on TV is often less adictive because you are told a story with its introduction, climax and ending(up until the Netflix ruined everything with it's endless shovelware).

IMHO, the key is moderation. A day with diverse activities is a day well spent, kid or adult.

Today, if I play Sid Meier's Civilization, a day or two would be completely gone and I will be disconnected from the reality and I will need to re-adapt to the real world. I suspect, excessive gamings primary risk is developing unhealthy understanding of the world in the area where the game simulates the real thing.

The moment games include advertising they optimize for all the wrong things. I won’t let my kids get free games on iPad, etc for this reason alone.

in what may be somewhat more of a hot take, i would argue that there is an incredible amount of educational value to be found even within the most meritless garbage games as they are still fundamentally systems to be dissected and solved and learning the maximally efficient way to do something worthless is a skillset that transfers quite handily to the valuable things in life. also unlike tv, games have a lot of potential to be immensely collaborative [or competitive] and social. some of my fondest childhood memories were going to my friend's house and co-oping diablo with one of us controlling the mouse and the other controlling the keyboard. there are many far less ad-hoc ways for kids to share games and even singleplayer is a highly rewarding shared experience.

For the record, my kids do play games, I never did complete ban. But, the gaming does not seem to be superior, does not zombify them less nor leads to more inventive play after session finished.

Reasoning through combat strategy, even in the age-inappropriate context of gun battles, exercises higher level thinking that clearly remains off when watching Ryan’s world.

To be fair, the article does say watching videos had a positive effect as well.

People used to say that about TV too.

I always feel a bit personally attacked when people claim videogames are just bad for you full stop. I'm really passionate about games, I grew up playing NES, and just never stopped. I almost always have a new game waiting to play for when I'm finished with what I'm currently playing.

Sample size of one, but I don't think my brain is rotten. I have a pretty successful career in software, I have a close partner, I have a social life. I have other hobbies too, but it's my main one.

Don't get me wrong, I know my gaming takes time away from other stuff I could/should be doing, like building side projects or getting enough exercise. But TV does the same, so in a choice between the two I pick gaming any day

Both have obvious benefits: Grimm Brothers tales are still culturally relevant for a reason, even if you can probably find useless brain fodder on Disney+; and video games can totally teach some stuff to your kids.

Just let them choose what they want I guess?

One rule I made to myself is simply don't encourage anything just for dopamine rewards. I try to mix things with effort, contemplation, or interaction. Doing something like this specific rule: No more than 1h playing Minecraft alone. If you want to keep playing, ask Dad, Mom, or your cousins to play together; the same for Watching videos.

Are you not just seeing what you want to see? Maybe from your wife's perspective, the kids are carefully to observing and learning a wide range of human emotions, social dynamics, new idioms and music from Disney+, whereas in their games they're learning a few tricks that they repeat ad nauseam to get some trivial rewards from their digital Skinner boxes?

That makes them more noisy, not less. PGS predictive power for EDU/IQ is always maximized at use of all SNPs. Restricting to the arbitrary subset of genome-wide statistically-significant SNPs in Lee would drive it from the 7% or so they have to <1%, IIRC.

Also, neither of your two problems are the problem here, as the biases there would not be expected to drive a correlation between video game playing & IQ (what sort of within-ethnic interaction would you need for that and why is it plausible?), and would mostly serve to simply not control for intelligence (and quantitatively, because the PGS here is a small fraction of the variance, even gross biases which somehow did manage to drive correlations between those two variables, would still be unable to meaningfully affect the estimates).

Today it's hiding and using the "smart"phone

Of course, if you push too hard the other way, your kid may just hate the skill and drop it. I knew a lot of people who were forced into piano lessons, and got very good at it too. Many quit over the years due to that resentment once their parents gave them the choice, and today never play any music in adulthood. Such a shame.

It's interesting with the internet too, even though there should be a lot more stories in the zeitgeist at once given its wide reach, sometimes due to its virality, one storyline is able to dominate everything at once and suck the air out of the room. Did we really need a dozen article about Will Smith slapping Chris Rock in everything from Reuters to The Atlantic for seemingly two whole days? If you only got news from twitter that might consume your entire feed. If you got your news from the newspaper, that would at most just consume one article or two out of many others of pages of printed material. It would also be limited to probably one section of the many different sections of the paper all covering different news topics.

Walking into arcade filled me with joy. Trying to decide which game to play. Imagining if I'm going to finally beat Wonderboy on one coin. Playing Kabal with my brother.

I was a good kid, but I would STEAL money from Mom's purse occasionally to satisfy my arcade craving.

Wow!