18 ms·

The impact of digital media on children’s intelligence

309 points by codesuki 4y ago

mdrzn 4y ago
"At baseline, time watching and socializing were negatively correlated with intelligence, while gaming did not correlate. After two years, gaming positively impacted intelligence, but socializing had no effect. This is consistent with cognitive benefits documented in experimental studies on video gaming." So it's confirmed? Gaming > Socializing? /s
- LewisVerstappen 4y ago
  Slightly confused on how they define "socializing" 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?
  - versteegen 4y ago
    > Following the steps of a previous study with this same dataset (measuring baseline associations only [13]), we categorized screen time here into three major groups: (a) Watching (1 + 2), (b) Socializing (4 + 5 + 6), (c) Gaming (3). So that's why they described it as " ocial media, text, and video chat". Their data comes from the ABCD study. I didn't look much further. https://abcdstudy.org/ https://abcdstudy.org/
- trelane 4y ago
  It's also tracking "intelligence" rather than e.g. "social skills" so there may be other benefits that they didn't track.
- RGamma 4y ago
  Those who played e.g. during WoW's golden age will attest that the two don't contradict whatsoever :)
- zivkovicp 4y ago
  Technically correct is the best kind of correct ;)
- Aeolun 4y ago
  Only if you optimize for intelligence accoring to the standards in the article. Intelligence does not directly correlate with either success in life or happiness (I believe intelligence is negatively correlated with happiness).
  - twofornone 4y ago
    Do you have a source for that? Happiness I can believe, especially because of the correlation between intelligence and neuroticism, but if IQ is a valid proxy for intelligence then I think the consensus is that intelligence strongly correlates with success.
    - hackernewds 4y ago
      High IQ people are also thought to be prone to ambition, questioning for purpose and stricter yearning at any achievement level which leaves them perennially unsatisfied
aaron695 4y ago
christophilus 4y ago
I’ve tried to encourage my wife to choose video games over Disney+ when she needs to drop the kids in front of something, but she still has a strong resistance to the idea that games are better. To me, it’s pretty obvious. The kids problem solve when gaming, and are obviously engaged. When watching TV, they look like zombies. I think my wife’s biggest hang up with games is that she was always told that they rot your brain. Also, our kids talk about games, but never about TV which she interprets as games being more addictive. I interpret it as games being more interesting and engaging.
- trelane 4y ago
  Games are designed to be addictive, so restraint is a good option. So is television, though, so limiting both is a good policy. I would guess that games' interactivity and personalization lead to much more opportunities for deeper addiction, though (see e.g loot boxes.)
  - christophilus 4y ago
    Yeah. We only let them play offline games that aren't gotcha. The current playlist is Journey, Zelda, Mario, Tunic, Death's Door.
  - Mandelmus 4y ago
    >Games are designed to be addictive It depends strongly on kind of game, and especially on the business model involved. Gacha games, free-to-play, and similar models are very much optimised around addictiveness. Personally I've found that story-based finite games, i.e. the ones you play through and then you've experienced it, are much better in those respects. Unfortunately those seem to become much more rare these days.
    - thr0wawayf00 4y ago
      > i.e. the ones you play through and then you've experienced it, are much better in those respects. This has not been my experience at all. It's very easy for me to play a few rounds of rocket league and keep my daily game time to under an hour. When I play stuff like Zelda BOTW though, I have to use the parental controls on myself or else I'll spend half of my day on it.
dash2 4y ago
The fact that they "controlled" for genetics using polygenic scores already is a strong sign of low quality research. Polygenic scores are powerful, but they contain very large amounts of noise compared to the true genetic effects. Controlling for genetics using them is like controlling for income by asking whether the respondents own a Porsche. Also, be aware that Scientific Reports is, if not quite a predatory journal, a very low bar. They publish tens of thousands of articles every year, while charging vast fees. In general, these guys have correlations, not causation. Children's IQ - and gaming habits etc. - develop as they age, so controlling for baseline IQ is not enough to make a correlation with later IQ and gaming causal. It seems much more likely that smarter kids game more, e.g. because they live in richer households. (No, controlling for SES isn't enough to rule this out, for much the same reasons of measurement error as for the genetics.) If you wanna believe that your hours on COD have made you a genius, go ahead, I won't stop you. Just don't imagine that this research proves it.
- nicce 4y ago
  The cost is no joke. ”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.”
  - napier 4y ago
    “Open access” journal fees are often accounted for by institutional affiliations or grant funding donors. The upside of upfront publication charges is that the research output isn’t paywalled and therefore ideally reaches more eyeballs and brainpans than the conventional route.
    - nicce 4y ago
      That is the upside, but there are many other high reputation peer-reviewed open journals with close to zero payment. Is the domain really worth the cost? It is kinda messed up, when you adjust the price based on the available money of institutional affiliations or donors. It is just more profits for journal and nothing for authors, while forcing authors to pay.
PKop 4y ago
Interesting points mentioned about genetic influence and heritability of intelligence.. "We believe that studies with genetic data could clarify causal claims and correct for the typically unaccounted role of genetic predispositions. Here, we estimated the impact of different types of screen time (watching, socializing, or gaming) on children’s intelligence while controlling for the confounding effects of genetic differences in cognition and socioeconomic status." "The contradictions among studies on screen time and cognition are likely due to limitations of cross-sectional designs, relatively small sample sizes, and, most critically, failures to control for genetic predispositions and socio-economic context. Although studies account for some confounding effects, very few have accounted for socioeconomic status and none have accounted for genetic effects. This matters because intelligence, educational attainment, and other cognitive abilities are all highly heritable."
- svnt 4y ago
  I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic but do take their claims here with a huge grain of salt.
javajosh 4y ago
The only program I let my kids use is KidPix on the iPad. It's a (rather remarkable) drawing and animation program and I'm constantly amazed at what they make with it. And sometimes horrified. But the 5 yo enjoys creating scenes with sound effects (that she recorded) and animation (that she also recorded), while the 3 yo enjoys making intricate drawings and then methodically coloring everything green. It's his favorite color, and he enjoys this. Not affiliated at all, but KidPix is a great piece of software, and I wouldn't have known about it except it was on a public library computer. My point is there is (at least) another important category of program that the researchers missed: creator software. I've also made simple songs with them with garage band, but the UI is still rather difficult for them to use it on their own. I was inspired to take this approach because my first introduction to computers was Logo on an Apple IIe, and Seymore Papert's beautiful work left a lasting impression.
- fullstop 4y ago
  Tux Paint is available for iOS. There's another one that my kids loved, which was a puppet show theater app, which easily let you animate characters and add voices. Unfortunately, I don't recall the name of it.
- lawgimenez 4y ago
  It's amazing the researchers forgot to include categories like apps. The apps my 3 year old son used is Pokpok, YouTube and an iOS app I develop specifically for him since he's on the non-verbal ASD spectrum. I believe this research is severely lacking.
- jrussino 4y ago
  There was a discussion here a few years back about this interview/documentary with the creator of the original KidPix: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25108875 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25108875
  - javajosh 4y ago
    Thanks jrussino! I was hoping HN would come through with some more info on the author, because it's clearly a special program, and it certainly wasn't on my radar before kids + public library. (They still call it "Kid Pix 3D" even though it's really "Kid Pix 5" on the iPad)
lesgobrandon 4y ago
noufalibrahim 4y ago
Can't say whether they're addictive or not. My personal opinion based on my own history is that the reward system in games (levelling up etc.) made me feel like I'd achieved something while in reality, I just entertained myself. Long hours of gaming and imbibing this translated over into the real world where it became harder for me to put in effort because I had to see rewards accumulate as a score somewhere and that wasn't happening.
- pcurve 4y ago
  Looking back in my childhood, I clearly exhibited sign of addition. 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!
objektif 4y ago
What are some good apps and games to have your 3-5 yo play? I can definitely see TV making them more and more mentally inactive.
- fassssst 4y ago
  GarageBand
- istorical 4y ago
  maybe just tell them leetcode is a video game.
- conqueso 4y ago
  I am very out of touch w/ the current world of gaming, but in my past experience Nintendo has always been the 'healthiest' platform. The games are full of beautiful animation and great music - truly works of art, and aren't violent and/or trying to get them to buy things.
f0e4c2f7 4y ago
When I was a kid I spent too much time on computers but it was mostly reading Wikipedia and googling programming questions, that kind of stuff. Where I grew up there wasn't anyone around I could ask those kinds of questions of. I know that's not the Netflix / ipad world that the study is talking about or nessecarily exists today. But I suspect that bifurcation still exists.
- ho_schi 4y ago
  My entry was scripting in Counter-Strike (Quake CFG Scripts). This cannot happen with consoles and Apps on Pads/Smartphones entirely prevent this. 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!
  - fartcannon 4y ago
    Which is a good reason to encourage Apple to open up their tiny handheld computers. So kids can learn to tinker.
- switchbak 4y ago
  My early days were DOS mode-x experiments mainly in Turbo Pascal. I had a manual I printed out, and some kind of BBS usenet-like forum thing. 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 :)
npilk 4y ago
Steven Johnson had an interesting take on this in his book Everything Bad Is Good For You: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_Bad_Is_Good_for_You https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_Bad_Is_Good_for_Y... TL;DR - the complexity of media has been increasing over the past decades, which means that children spending time with digital media are benefiting from it relative to past generations. As an example, playing a modern AAA video game is much more mentally stimulating than playing Pong. But also, watching an hour of a modern TV show, or even a modern reality show, is more challenging mentally than watching classic TV from the 60s and 70s—there are many, many more plots and relationship dynamics to track and speculate about.
- germinalphrase 4y ago
  A counter argument (made by Alan Kay and others) is that the language complexity of what people read is reducing which is leading to a return to an oral culture rather than literate culture (to our collective detriment). My anecdotal experience as a high school English teacher leads me to say this feels true.
  - svnt 4y ago
    Who are the others? I would like to read more about this.
    - leonroy 4y ago
      A few years back a comparitive analysis was made of past president's vocabularies and their grade level: https://www.newsweek.com/trump-fire-and-fury-smart-genius-obama-774169 https://www.newsweek.com/trump-fire-and-fury-smart-genius-ob... Politics aside it does seem that presidents have been pitching their language lower and lower to appeal to a broader audience. I recall reading about how Obama simplified the vocabulary of his speeches from college level to 10th grade, to 4th grade to 2nd grade: https://smartpolitics.lib.umn.edu/2010/01/29/professor-obama-presidents-sta/ https://smartpolitics.lib.umn.edu/2010/01/29/professor-obama... https://smartpolitics.lib.umn.edu/2011/01/27/keeping-it-simple-obama-record/ https://smartpolitics.lib.umn.edu/2011/01/27/keeping-it-simp... On the flip side though George Washington's first inaugaral address goes to the other extreme where it's impenetrably verbose: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/10/have-presidential-speeches-gotten-less-sophisticated-over-time/381410/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/10/have-pr... Anecdata at this point but I fear the OP might be right - we are simplifying our language over time.
da39a3ee 4y ago
They say that some of their main conclusions change if they control for parental education level, which they did not do. So that makes it all sounds questionable. Plus I've never heard of the journal; don't be misled into thinking it's a high profile Nature journal. Someone else here says it's a low quality journal.
thenerdhead 4y ago
If this study has you scratching your head about the impact of digital media, do have a read of "Four arguments for the elimination of television" by Jerry Mander. The arguments included in it are no different than many of these new studies coming out. If you grew up to be a latchkey kid and had your fair share of TV/video games/etc, it might give you perspective into things you never thought about. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3NBEurnIqY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3NBEurnIqY
- npteljes 4y ago
  I had to look this up on Wikipedia: "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."
- erikpukinskis 4y ago
  Interesting perspective. 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.
  - thenerdhead 4y ago
    Thanks for sharing. I'm sure there's plenty of counter-arguments to his, but the only thing I have to work with is my anecdote/experiences. Ridding myself of TV over the last 2 years has been extremely hard. I'm down to watching a maximum of an hour a night. Most times I don't even try nor care to. I have seen significant improvements to my own life, but most importantly I see the effects it has had on my young kids and how much more creative they are because they aren't sitting in front of a TV watching shows like I was when I was their age. It was the only thing I knew as a parent taught by mine and I had to challenge that for myself. Moderation is the key to everything, but this book woke me up to things I wasn't aware of and figured I'd share.
carbocation 4y ago
I don't think the problem is that polygenic scores are noisy. (You can choose to make them less noisy by restricting to significant SNPs, for example.) And noise doesn't require directional bias. But to me there are 2 problems: (A) Polygenic scores for behavioral traits may be estimated in GWAS where the null assumptions (e.g., that mating is not conditioned on the trait being estimated) may not be valid[1]. That is on top of the issues that we usually face for other phenotypes (e.g., more routine population stratification due to geographic history). (B) The authors did not describe the (genetic) ancestral background of the children being studied. Current techniques are biased across ancestries, for most traits, when using polygenic scores[2]. Certainly adjusting for 20PCs in the final model, as the authors seemingly did, would not be expected to make the scores comparable unless all of the children are from a close ancestral group. With these sources of stratification, the polygenic score represents more (and less) than the trait that you're hoping it estimates; it also encodes population stratification. As such, I hardly think this study can be interpreted. 1 = https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-28294-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-28294-9 2 = https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6563838/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6563838/
- gwern 4y ago
  > You can choose to make them less noisy by restricting to significant SNPs, for example. 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).
  - carbocation 4y ago
    > That makes them more noisy, not less. Using only genome-wide significant SNPs reduces the amount of variance explained by the polygenic score, which is what you describe and I agree with. My comment about the concern about "noise" is with respect to a sibling comment ("Polygenic scores are powerful, but they contain very large amounts of noise compared to the true genetic effects.") That is the "noise" that I was addressing. And just as you say, the noise is, essentially, a worthwhile cost to pay since it should not be directional, and so we use various approaches to include thousands or millions of SNPs in these scores. > Also, neither of your two problems are the problem here I don't agree. These problems occur very clearly in any mixed-ancestry analyses, and they have to be carefully accounted for or else they induce between-ancestry bias. It's not a function of the phenotype itself (i.e., I'm not making a comment about intelligence); this is true for all polygenic scores.
swframe2 4y ago
I think it is better to focus on getting kids to do creative projects. For example, parents should get them to write and illustrate a story once a month, or learn to play a music instrument, etc. If kids are doing interesting projects that change yearly and they work to improve their skills then the amount of time they spend on digital media will decrease and will not be a concern. Having kids do projects is super helpful. 1) It builds their confidence in their ability 2) It shows the world (e.g. college admission boards) how they are valuable 3) It can become a way for them to be their own boss 4) It allows them to figure out what they want to be 5) It keeps them busy and out of trouble
- asdff 4y ago
  The "get them to" part is the killer. I was easily frustrated as a kid and quit a lot of things in hindsight that I wish I stuck with. You never realize that time now is an investment for later, or that learning curves are different for everyone as a kid. I think that environment where you are in a cohort as a kid can be challenging too. If you see a few people in your class who are really good at something and you are struggling, that kills your confidence, and you will probably quit before actually putting in the work you need to get yourself to that same level and just assume it will always be impossible for you. As an adult now I see a lot of my peers still with this mentality and they drop new hobbies fast. Life is a slow march though and you shouldn't hold yourself to the standards of others, but that's a lifelong lesson that even 35 year olds are learning, and not something you can easily tell a 5 year old. 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.
sidcool 4y ago
It's a huge report. TL;DR anyone?
conqueso 4y ago
"Digital media" is a gigantic umbrella and there are so many variations and confounding factors that I doubt anything useful could come from a study like this. As with anything that has the potential for addiction or maladaptive behavior, the difference between healthy and unhealthy consumption comes down to moderation and mindful consumption.
coffeeblack 4y ago
Is playing chess online “digital media”? What about learning to code with online tutorials?
- TameAntelope 4y ago
  Playing chess, a game, is probably considered "gaming".
aporetics 4y ago
Is the effect of media on intelligence really the primary concern? Ad absurdum: if watching the Kardashians for two hours a day doubled your intelligence (however you decide to measure that) would you do it? Would you have your kids do it?
raptortech 4y ago
"Unexpectedly, watching videos also benefited intelligence (standardized β = + 0.12)" I would love to know what "watching videos" means here. There's a big difference between educational YouTube (Kurzgesagt, Physics Girl, Vertitasium, etc) and TV.
Melatonic 4y ago
Measuring "Intelligence" always seems to result in some questionable science..... That being said I do wonder about how I would have turned out had my childhood not been spent hiding under the covers at night with a small light devouring novel after novel and instead been inundated with social media and other distractions.
- woliveirajr 4y ago
  Hiding and reading instead of sleeping is some universal thing? Fine :-) Today it's hiding and using the "smart"phone
tastysandwich 4y ago
I worry about my future children's relationship with technology, especially social media. But I'm not really concerned about general intelligence. As a parent I feel I have some input into their intellectual growth (to the extent environment allows). I'm far more concerned about the impact of social media on their emotional wellbeing. How they interact with others, and how they view themselves. In Australia the Government is trying to regulate social media companies. For example, last year it introduced an "anti-trolling" bill, which would require companies to reveal the identities of anonymous trolls. And this is only the beginning of what in my opinion is heavy-handed Government overreach that will not improve the online experience of young people. Despite being a fairly libertarian person, I'm open to a discussion on banning social media for people under a certain age (16? 18?). And then getting rid of all/most regulations on content. Not saying this is something we should do right now, or that it's definitely a good idea. I'm just saying I think it's a discussion worth having.

309 points by codesuki 4y ago

"At baseline, time watching and socializing were negatively correlated with intelligence, while gaming did not correlate. After two years, gaming positively impacted intelligence, but socializing had no effect. This is consistent with cognitive benefits documented in experimental studies on video gaming." So it's confirmed? Gaming > Socializing? /s

LewisVerstappen 4y ago
Slightly confused on how they define "socializing" 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?
- versteegen 4y ago
  > Following the steps of a previous study with this same dataset (measuring baseline associations only [13]), we categorized screen time here into three major groups: (a) Watching (1 + 2), (b) Socializing (4 + 5 + 6), (c) Gaming (3). So that's why they described it as " ocial media, text, and video chat". Their data comes from the ABCD study. I didn't look much further. https://abcdstudy.org/ https://abcdstudy.org/
trelane 4y ago
It's also tracking "intelligence" rather than e.g. "social skills" so there may be other benefits that they didn't track.
RGamma 4y ago
Those who played e.g. during WoW's golden age will attest that the two don't contradict whatsoever :)
zivkovicp 4y ago
Technically correct is the best kind of correct ;)
Aeolun 4y ago
Only if you optimize for intelligence accoring to the standards in the article. Intelligence does not directly correlate with either success in life or happiness (I believe intelligence is negatively correlated with happiness).
- twofornone 4y ago
  Do you have a source for that? Happiness I can believe, especially because of the correlation between intelligence and neuroticism, but if IQ is a valid proxy for intelligence then I think the consensus is that intelligence strongly correlates with success.
  - hackernewds 4y ago
    High IQ people are also thought to be prone to ambition, questioning for purpose and stricter yearning at any achievement level which leaves them perennially unsatisfied

aaron695 4y ago

christophilus 4y ago

I’ve tried to encourage my wife to choose video games over Disney+ when she needs to drop the kids in front of something, but she still has a strong resistance to the idea that games are better. To me, it’s pretty obvious. The kids problem solve when gaming, and are obviously engaged. When watching TV, they look like zombies. I think my wife’s biggest hang up with games is that she was always told that they rot your brain. Also, our kids talk about games, but never about TV which she interprets as games being more addictive. I interpret it as games being more interesting and engaging.

trelane 4y ago
Games are designed to be addictive, so restraint is a good option. So is television, though, so limiting both is a good policy. I would guess that games' interactivity and personalization lead to much more opportunities for deeper addiction, though (see e.g loot boxes.)
- christophilus 4y ago
  Yeah. We only let them play offline games that aren't gotcha. The current playlist is Journey, Zelda, Mario, Tunic, Death's Door.
- Mandelmus 4y ago
  >Games are designed to be addictive It depends strongly on kind of game, and especially on the business model involved. Gacha games, free-to-play, and similar models are very much optimised around addictiveness. Personally I've found that story-based finite games, i.e. the ones you play through and then you've experienced it, are much better in those respects. Unfortunately those seem to become much more rare these days.
  - thr0wawayf00 4y ago
    > i.e. the ones you play through and then you've experienced it, are much better in those respects. This has not been my experience at all. It's very easy for me to play a few rounds of rocket league and keep my daily game time to under an hour. When I play stuff like Zelda BOTW though, I have to use the parental controls on myself or else I'll spend half of my day on it.

dash2 4y ago

The fact that they "controlled" for genetics using polygenic scores already is a strong sign of low quality research. Polygenic scores are powerful, but they contain very large amounts of noise compared to the true genetic effects. Controlling for genetics using them is like controlling for income by asking whether the respondents own a Porsche. Also, be aware that Scientific Reports is, if not quite a predatory journal, a very low bar. They publish tens of thousands of articles every year, while charging vast fees. In general, these guys have correlations, not causation. Children's IQ - and gaming habits etc. - develop as they age, so controlling for baseline IQ is not enough to make a correlation with later IQ and gaming causal. It seems much more likely that smarter kids game more, e.g. because they live in richer households. (No, controlling for SES isn't enough to rule this out, for much the same reasons of measurement error as for the genetics.) If you wanna believe that your hours on COD have made you a genius, go ahead, I won't stop you. Just don't imagine that this research proves it.

nicce 4y ago
The cost is no joke. ”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.”
- napier 4y ago
  “Open access” journal fees are often accounted for by institutional affiliations or grant funding donors. The upside of upfront publication charges is that the research output isn’t paywalled and therefore ideally reaches more eyeballs and brainpans than the conventional route.
  - nicce 4y ago
    That is the upside, but there are many other high reputation peer-reviewed open journals with close to zero payment. Is the domain really worth the cost? It is kinda messed up, when you adjust the price based on the available money of institutional affiliations or donors. It is just more profits for journal and nothing for authors, while forcing authors to pay.

PKop 4y ago

Interesting points mentioned about genetic influence and heritability of intelligence.. "We believe that studies with genetic data could clarify causal claims and correct for the typically unaccounted role of genetic predispositions. Here, we estimated the impact of different types of screen time (watching, socializing, or gaming) on children’s intelligence while controlling for the confounding effects of genetic differences in cognition and socioeconomic status." "The contradictions among studies on screen time and cognition are likely due to limitations of cross-sectional designs, relatively small sample sizes, and, most critically, failures to control for genetic predispositions and socio-economic context. Although studies account for some confounding effects, very few have accounted for socioeconomic status and none have accounted for genetic effects. This matters because intelligence, educational attainment, and other cognitive abilities are all highly heritable."

svnt 4y ago
I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic but do take their claims here with a huge grain of salt.

javajosh 4y ago

The only program I let my kids use is KidPix on the iPad. It's a (rather remarkable) drawing and animation program and I'm constantly amazed at what they make with it. And sometimes horrified. But the 5 yo enjoys creating scenes with sound effects (that she recorded) and animation (that she also recorded), while the 3 yo enjoys making intricate drawings and then methodically coloring everything green. It's his favorite color, and he enjoys this. Not affiliated at all, but KidPix is a great piece of software, and I wouldn't have known about it except it was on a public library computer. My point is there is (at least) another important category of program that the researchers missed: creator software. I've also made simple songs with them with garage band, but the UI is still rather difficult for them to use it on their own. I was inspired to take this approach because my first introduction to computers was Logo on an Apple IIe, and Seymore Papert's beautiful work left a lasting impression.

fullstop 4y ago
Tux Paint is available for iOS. There's another one that my kids loved, which was a puppet show theater app, which easily let you animate characters and add voices. Unfortunately, I don't recall the name of it.
lawgimenez 4y ago
It's amazing the researchers forgot to include categories like apps. The apps my 3 year old son used is Pokpok, YouTube and an iOS app I develop specifically for him since he's on the non-verbal ASD spectrum. I believe this research is severely lacking.
jrussino 4y ago
There was a discussion here a few years back about this interview/documentary with the creator of the original KidPix: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25108875 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25108875
- javajosh 4y ago
  Thanks jrussino! I was hoping HN would come through with some more info on the author, because it's clearly a special program, and it certainly wasn't on my radar before kids + public library. (They still call it "Kid Pix 3D" even though it's really "Kid Pix 5" on the iPad)

lesgobrandon 4y ago

noufalibrahim 4y ago

Can't say whether they're addictive or not. My personal opinion based on my own history is that the reward system in games (levelling up etc.) made me feel like I'd achieved something while in reality, I just entertained myself. Long hours of gaming and imbibing this translated over into the real world where it became harder for me to put in effort because I had to see rewards accumulate as a score somewhere and that wasn't happening.

pcurve 4y ago
Looking back in my childhood, I clearly exhibited sign of addition. 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!

objektif 4y ago

What are some good apps and games to have your 3-5 yo play? I can definitely see TV making them more and more mentally inactive.

fassssst 4y ago
GarageBand
istorical 4y ago
maybe just tell them leetcode is a video game.
conqueso 4y ago
I am very out of touch w/ the current world of gaming, but in my past experience Nintendo has always been the 'healthiest' platform. The games are full of beautiful animation and great music - truly works of art, and aren't violent and/or trying to get them to buy things.

f0e4c2f7 4y ago

When I was a kid I spent too much time on computers but it was mostly reading Wikipedia and googling programming questions, that kind of stuff. Where I grew up there wasn't anyone around I could ask those kinds of questions of. I know that's not the Netflix / ipad world that the study is talking about or nessecarily exists today. But I suspect that bifurcation still exists.

ho_schi 4y ago
My entry was scripting in Counter-Strike (Quake CFG Scripts). This cannot happen with consoles and Apps on Pads/Smartphones entirely prevent this. 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!
- fartcannon 4y ago
  Which is a good reason to encourage Apple to open up their tiny handheld computers. So kids can learn to tinker.
switchbak 4y ago
My early days were DOS mode-x experiments mainly in Turbo Pascal. I had a manual I printed out, and some kind of BBS usenet-like forum thing. 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 :)

npilk 4y ago

Steven Johnson had an interesting take on this in his book Everything Bad Is Good For You: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_Bad_Is_Good_for_You https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_Bad_Is_Good_for_Y... TL;DR - the complexity of media has been increasing over the past decades, which means that children spending time with digital media are benefiting from it relative to past generations. As an example, playing a modern AAA video game is much more mentally stimulating than playing Pong. But also, watching an hour of a modern TV show, or even a modern reality show, is more challenging mentally than watching classic TV from the 60s and 70s—there are many, many more plots and relationship dynamics to track and speculate about.

germinalphrase 4y ago
A counter argument (made by Alan Kay and others) is that the language complexity of what people read is reducing which is leading to a return to an oral culture rather than literate culture (to our collective detriment). My anecdotal experience as a high school English teacher leads me to say this feels true.
- svnt 4y ago
  Who are the others? I would like to read more about this.
  - leonroy 4y ago
    A few years back a comparitive analysis was made of past president's vocabularies and their grade level: https://www.newsweek.com/trump-fire-and-fury-smart-genius-obama-774169 https://www.newsweek.com/trump-fire-and-fury-smart-genius-ob... Politics aside it does seem that presidents have been pitching their language lower and lower to appeal to a broader audience. I recall reading about how Obama simplified the vocabulary of his speeches from college level to 10th grade, to 4th grade to 2nd grade: https://smartpolitics.lib.umn.edu/2010/01/29/professor-obama-presidents-sta/ https://smartpolitics.lib.umn.edu/2010/01/29/professor-obama... https://smartpolitics.lib.umn.edu/2011/01/27/keeping-it-simple-obama-record/ https://smartpolitics.lib.umn.edu/2011/01/27/keeping-it-simp... On the flip side though George Washington's first inaugaral address goes to the other extreme where it's impenetrably verbose: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/10/have-presidential-speeches-gotten-less-sophisticated-over-time/381410/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/10/have-pr... Anecdata at this point but I fear the OP might be right - we are simplifying our language over time.

da39a3ee 4y ago

They say that some of their main conclusions change if they control for parental education level, which they did not do. So that makes it all sounds questionable. Plus I've never heard of the journal; don't be misled into thinking it's a high profile Nature journal. Someone else here says it's a low quality journal.

thenerdhead 4y ago

If this study has you scratching your head about the impact of digital media, do have a read of "Four arguments for the elimination of television" by Jerry Mander. The arguments included in it are no different than many of these new studies coming out. If you grew up to be a latchkey kid and had your fair share of TV/video games/etc, it might give you perspective into things you never thought about. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3NBEurnIqY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3NBEurnIqY

npteljes 4y ago
I had to look this up on Wikipedia: "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."
erikpukinskis 4y ago
Interesting perspective. 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.
- thenerdhead 4y ago
  Thanks for sharing. I'm sure there's plenty of counter-arguments to his, but the only thing I have to work with is my anecdote/experiences. Ridding myself of TV over the last 2 years has been extremely hard. I'm down to watching a maximum of an hour a night. Most times I don't even try nor care to. I have seen significant improvements to my own life, but most importantly I see the effects it has had on my young kids and how much more creative they are because they aren't sitting in front of a TV watching shows like I was when I was their age. It was the only thing I knew as a parent taught by mine and I had to challenge that for myself. Moderation is the key to everything, but this book woke me up to things I wasn't aware of and figured I'd share.

carbocation 4y ago

I don't think the problem is that polygenic scores are noisy. (You can choose to make them less noisy by restricting to significant SNPs, for example.) And noise doesn't require directional bias. But to me there are 2 problems: (A) Polygenic scores for behavioral traits may be estimated in GWAS where the null assumptions (e.g., that mating is not conditioned on the trait being estimated) may not be valid[1]. That is on top of the issues that we usually face for other phenotypes (e.g., more routine population stratification due to geographic history). (B) The authors did not describe the (genetic) ancestral background of the children being studied. Current techniques are biased across ancestries, for most traits, when using polygenic scores[2]. Certainly adjusting for 20PCs in the final model, as the authors seemingly did, would not be expected to make the scores comparable unless all of the children are from a close ancestral group. With these sources of stratification, the polygenic score represents more (and less) than the trait that you're hoping it estimates; it also encodes population stratification. As such, I hardly think this study can be interpreted. 1 = https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-28294-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-28294-9 2 = https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6563838/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6563838/

gwern 4y ago
> You can choose to make them less noisy by restricting to significant SNPs, for example. 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).
- carbocation 4y ago
  > That makes them more noisy, not less. Using only genome-wide significant SNPs reduces the amount of variance explained by the polygenic score, which is what you describe and I agree with. My comment about the concern about "noise" is with respect to a sibling comment ("Polygenic scores are powerful, but they contain very large amounts of noise compared to the true genetic effects.") That is the "noise" that I was addressing. And just as you say, the noise is, essentially, a worthwhile cost to pay since it should not be directional, and so we use various approaches to include thousands or millions of SNPs in these scores. > Also, neither of your two problems are the problem here I don't agree. These problems occur very clearly in any mixed-ancestry analyses, and they have to be carefully accounted for or else they induce between-ancestry bias. It's not a function of the phenotype itself (i.e., I'm not making a comment about intelligence); this is true for all polygenic scores.

swframe2 4y ago

I think it is better to focus on getting kids to do creative projects. For example, parents should get them to write and illustrate a story once a month, or learn to play a music instrument, etc. If kids are doing interesting projects that change yearly and they work to improve their skills then the amount of time they spend on digital media will decrease and will not be a concern. Having kids do projects is super helpful. 1) It builds their confidence in their ability 2) It shows the world (e.g. college admission boards) how they are valuable 3) It can become a way for them to be their own boss 4) It allows them to figure out what they want to be 5) It keeps them busy and out of trouble

asdff 4y ago
The "get them to" part is the killer. I was easily frustrated as a kid and quit a lot of things in hindsight that I wish I stuck with. You never realize that time now is an investment for later, or that learning curves are different for everyone as a kid. I think that environment where you are in a cohort as a kid can be challenging too. If you see a few people in your class who are really good at something and you are struggling, that kills your confidence, and you will probably quit before actually putting in the work you need to get yourself to that same level and just assume it will always be impossible for you. As an adult now I see a lot of my peers still with this mentality and they drop new hobbies fast. Life is a slow march though and you shouldn't hold yourself to the standards of others, but that's a lifelong lesson that even 35 year olds are learning, and not something you can easily tell a 5 year old. 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.

sidcool 4y ago

It's a huge report. TL;DR anyone?

conqueso 4y ago

"Digital media" is a gigantic umbrella and there are so many variations and confounding factors that I doubt anything useful could come from a study like this. As with anything that has the potential for addiction or maladaptive behavior, the difference between healthy and unhealthy consumption comes down to moderation and mindful consumption.

coffeeblack 4y ago

Is playing chess online “digital media”? What about learning to code with online tutorials?

TameAntelope 4y ago
Playing chess, a game, is probably considered "gaming".

aporetics 4y ago

Is the effect of media on intelligence really the primary concern? Ad absurdum: if watching the Kardashians for two hours a day doubled your intelligence (however you decide to measure that) would you do it? Would you have your kids do it?

raptortech 4y ago

"Unexpectedly, watching videos also benefited intelligence (standardized β = + 0.12)" I would love to know what "watching videos" means here. There's a big difference between educational YouTube (Kurzgesagt, Physics Girl, Vertitasium, etc) and TV.

Melatonic 4y ago

Measuring "Intelligence" always seems to result in some questionable science..... That being said I do wonder about how I would have turned out had my childhood not been spent hiding under the covers at night with a small light devouring novel after novel and instead been inundated with social media and other distractions.

woliveirajr 4y ago
Hiding and reading instead of sleeping is some universal thing? Fine :-) Today it's hiding and using the "smart"phone

tastysandwich 4y ago

I worry about my future children's relationship with technology, especially social media. But I'm not really concerned about general intelligence. As a parent I feel I have some input into their intellectual growth (to the extent environment allows). I'm far more concerned about the impact of social media on their emotional wellbeing. How they interact with others, and how they view themselves. In Australia the Government is trying to regulate social media companies. For example, last year it introduced an "anti-trolling" bill, which would require companies to reveal the identities of anonymous trolls. And this is only the beginning of what in my opinion is heavy-handed Government overreach that will not improve the online experience of young people. Despite being a fairly libertarian person, I'm open to a discussion on banning social media for people under a certain age (16? 18?). And then getting rid of all/most regulations on content. Not saying this is something we should do right now, or that it's definitely a good idea. I'm just saying I think it's a discussion worth having.