10 ms·

So, per this page: "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

So, per this page: "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=1002&context=post_coundfpub 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"

kazinator 6y ago
> Why did this need study? The answer is probably the usual: money. Someone got a "use it or lose it" budget.
nelaboras 6y ago
In addition there is a key qualitative element: are all uses equal? Is watching Teletubbies or Paw Patrol equal to nature documentaries? Is playing addictive repetitive games different than those solving puzzles or following a story? Is videoconferencing with grandma the same or better or worse as doing a math training game? 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?
- arendtio 6y ago
  Exactly what I thought. A few years ago, I was in a hotel where one family gave their kids tablets to watch movies during breakfast. I can hardly imagine that this practice is beneficial for the kids development.
  - grugagag 6y ago
    Thats lazy parenting IMO. My 2 yo son was not inteoduced to tablets or phones because there are so many more things they could do. He loves for example snap in puzzles where a lot of faculties develop but almost anything physical is beneficial at this age. There is time for computers and tablets later on, whats the rush?
    - eggy 6y ago
      How about both? I have older children 21 and 22, and I have some new ones, ages 1 and 5. I have always done as much as I can with my children. I also have learned to set them up with an activity and let them go at it without my constant supervision. They don't always look for outside answers, but instead figure it out on their own. I was anti-TV and computer with my older children, but I still allowed it, and they are doing great (one a physics major, the other in medical school). My current children seem to be doing just fine too compared with their peers.
      - grugagag 6y ago
        Since you were anti-tv you probably kept an eye on what they were watching. TV or tablets aren’t the concern themselves, but the content pushed on them. I learned quite a bit from TV back in the 90s, luckily back then I didn’t have access to addictive junk.
        jkhdigital 6y ago
        Yeah this is an important detail that is typically glossed over: the device is just a content delivery platform, and the content is what really matters. As a parent I find that policing content is a much more challenging and stressful task than simply managing screen time.
- boweryking 6y ago
  From watching friends and family in the last ten years, I would like to add economical class and education level (maybe what we would call cultural capital) as one factor to this. 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.
devmunchies 6y ago
Yeah, right. “Kids who spend a lot of time on tablet are better at playing a tablet game”
lern_too_spel 6y ago
Your "better" study is not an experiment and its conclusions are not supported by empirical evidence. 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. No such effect can be observed. Instead, the children who were neglected with random household items to play with by themselves or TVs to watch by themselves are now neglected with touchscreens to play with by themselves, and studies such as yours misattribute the effects of childhood neglect to touchscreen usage. 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.
- microtherion 6y ago
  Yes, unless I'm greatly misunderstanding the tables, what the study actually measured is that: * 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.
- acituan 6y ago
  > Your "better" study is not an experiment and its conclusions are not supported by empirical evidence. 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.
whoknos99 6y ago
Huh my kids both get tablet almost daily and have since they were toddlers. As toddlers they also started growing food, hiking, learning counting through dice toss, at kids music groups, putting away their toys, cleaning the house, and playing with way too many building and science-y toys. Cognitive research has shown for decades hands on depth in a variety of contexts enables people. It’s the market economics narrative enabling economic horders that’s making it so both parents need to work and kids get neglected that’s keeping them stupid.
Spooky23 6y ago
The same sort of stuff was said about the 80s kids in my cohort because we were "latchkey" kids and watching lots of TV. It was bullshit then and bullshit now. 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.
- mola 6y ago
  You don't know that. The way we think changed a lot in the last 40 years. Researching the causes and dynamics of these changes are very hard to study and even harder to correlate and then much more to prove causation. We basically don't have the scientific means or theory for this type of long term changes. 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.
  - Spooky23 6y ago
    > The way we think changed a lot in the last 40 years. 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.
- plutonorm 6y ago
  God damn it. I've been searching for a way to loaf of my very high IQ my whole life. I wish someone had told me this 30 years ago lol. Join the civil service. 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.
GuB-42 6y ago
> No discussion as to any other effect of screen use. 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.
- fma 6y ago
  My interpretation of the summary was that the researchers will follow the same kids later in life and see the impact. They are just reporting the current results. Per the article "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.
boublepop 6y ago
Sooo you’re telling me that if I give my toddler a pain brush he’ll be the next davinci? Could you follow up with some more specific direction? I mean if I want to raise a pop-star does the microphone need to be plugged in or does using it like a lightsaber also get them closer to the target? 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.
- crmrc114 6y ago
  Thats a black or white fallacy: I think carried to the extreme it would be like me making the claim that kids who use tablets will become software engineers. My argument, is that screen time makes kids better at interacting with screens. 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.

kazinator 6y ago

> Why did this need study? The answer is probably the usual: money. Someone got a "use it or lose it" budget.

nelaboras 6y ago

In addition there is a key qualitative element: are all uses equal? Is watching Teletubbies or Paw Patrol equal to nature documentaries? Is playing addictive repetitive games different than those solving puzzles or following a story? Is videoconferencing with grandma the same or better or worse as doing a math training game? 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?

arendtio 6y ago
Exactly what I thought. A few years ago, I was in a hotel where one family gave their kids tablets to watch movies during breakfast. I can hardly imagine that this practice is beneficial for the kids development.
- grugagag 6y ago
  Thats lazy parenting IMO. My 2 yo son was not inteoduced to tablets or phones because there are so many more things they could do. He loves for example snap in puzzles where a lot of faculties develop but almost anything physical is beneficial at this age. There is time for computers and tablets later on, whats the rush?
  - eggy 6y ago
    How about both? I have older children 21 and 22, and I have some new ones, ages 1 and 5. I have always done as much as I can with my children. I also have learned to set them up with an activity and let them go at it without my constant supervision. They don't always look for outside answers, but instead figure it out on their own. I was anti-TV and computer with my older children, but I still allowed it, and they are doing great (one a physics major, the other in medical school). My current children seem to be doing just fine too compared with their peers.
    - grugagag 6y ago
      Since you were anti-tv you probably kept an eye on what they were watching. TV or tablets aren’t the concern themselves, but the content pushed on them. I learned quite a bit from TV back in the 90s, luckily back then I didn’t have access to addictive junk.
      - jkhdigital 6y ago
        Yeah this is an important detail that is typically glossed over: the device is just a content delivery platform, and the content is what really matters. As a parent I find that policing content is a much more challenging and stressful task than simply managing screen time.
boweryking 6y ago
From watching friends and family in the last ten years, I would like to add economical class and education level (maybe what we would call cultural capital) as one factor to this. 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.

devmunchies 6y ago

Yeah, right. “Kids who spend a lot of time on tablet are better at playing a tablet game”

lern_too_spel 6y ago

Your "better" study is not an experiment and its conclusions are not supported by empirical evidence. 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. No such effect can be observed. Instead, the children who were neglected with random household items to play with by themselves or TVs to watch by themselves are now neglected with touchscreens to play with by themselves, and studies such as yours misattribute the effects of childhood neglect to touchscreen usage. 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.

microtherion 6y ago
Yes, unless I'm greatly misunderstanding the tables, what the study actually measured is that: * 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.
acituan 6y ago
> Your "better" study is not an experiment and its conclusions are not supported by empirical evidence. 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.

whoknos99 6y ago

Huh my kids both get tablet almost daily and have since they were toddlers. As toddlers they also started growing food, hiking, learning counting through dice toss, at kids music groups, putting away their toys, cleaning the house, and playing with way too many building and science-y toys. Cognitive research has shown for decades hands on depth in a variety of contexts enables people. It’s the market economics narrative enabling economic horders that’s making it so both parents need to work and kids get neglected that’s keeping them stupid.

Spooky23 6y ago

The same sort of stuff was said about the 80s kids in my cohort because we were "latchkey" kids and watching lots of TV. It was bullshit then and bullshit now. 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.

mola 6y ago
You don't know that. The way we think changed a lot in the last 40 years. Researching the causes and dynamics of these changes are very hard to study and even harder to correlate and then much more to prove causation. We basically don't have the scientific means or theory for this type of long term changes. 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.
- Spooky23 6y ago
  > The way we think changed a lot in the last 40 years. 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.
plutonorm 6y ago
God damn it. I've been searching for a way to loaf of my very high IQ my whole life. I wish someone had told me this 30 years ago lol. Join the civil service. 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.

GuB-42 6y ago

> No discussion as to any other effect of screen use. 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.

fma 6y ago
My interpretation of the summary was that the researchers will follow the same kids later in life and see the impact. They are just reporting the current results. Per the article "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.

boublepop 6y ago

Sooo you’re telling me that if I give my toddler a pain brush he’ll be the next davinci? Could you follow up with some more specific direction? I mean if I want to raise a pop-star does the microphone need to be plugged in or does using it like a lightsaber also get them closer to the target? 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.

crmrc114 6y ago
Thats a black or white fallacy: I think carried to the extreme it would be like me making the claim that kids who use tablets will become software engineers. My argument, is that screen time makes kids better at interacting with screens. 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.