6 ms·

Associations between infant screen use, EEG markers, and cognitive outcomes

bhouston 4y ago
I sort of thought so. The screen acts as an external cognitive attention hold and thus you do not need to as much manage your own. You can externalize your attention via screens, just like we can externalize memory to our computers, etc.
superkuh 4y ago
I wonder why this effect was not discovered when screens were first invented and entered the home back in the early 20th century when televisions came about. It really makes me doubt the entire premise as screens have not changed since then. It just seems like another unfounded moral panic like when people blamed books, newspapers, or radio for youth misbehavior. Every generation has it's own. It's weird that we've gone back to the 1940s for the 2020s moral panic. Using EEG to try to say something about executive function has about as much legitimacy as a horoscope does about how my day will go. It's amazing this passed JAMA's review to be published.
- georgeburdell 4y ago
  Screens are far more interactive now. Perhaps that’s a component as well
  - the_only_law 4y ago
    I think this might be something to it. I’ve noticed parallels between the stereotypical “kid glued to their phone” and “elderly person glued to slot machine at the casino”. Both of those are more interactive that TV.
  - miriam_catira 4y ago
    This paper is talking about screen use by infants - within the first year of life. Screen interaction can not be the major problem here, it's much more likely to be a lack of interaction with other humans. That's key to infant development, so it shouldn't be a surprise that a lack of stimulus from carers would lead to issues later.
    - martinjacobd 4y ago
      I'm not sure why it would be true that screen time is not a problem for a <1yr old. At about 6-9 months (maybe before) they are able to interact with the screen, and they interact much more with it if it has bright colors and responds to their touch. We would occasionally allow our eldest to use the phone around this age and she would become despondent if it was taken away. So we decided never to do that again. Of course, a lack of interaction with humans could be a factor too but in our case we were literally playing with it alongside her and she would still get upset if it was taken away.
      - miriam_catira 4y ago
        Not saying that it wouldn't be an issue at older ages as well, since for millenia children learned by watching the other people around them and learning from them, not from screens. That's my essential point - that's utterly essential for infants, even more at that age than later. Not that suddenly it becomes ok! But if we want to keep the discussion on topic, we should talk about the age group being studied. Beyond that, we want to have a different study. (edit, grammar because it's really too early in the morning for writing)
        martinjacobd 4y ago
        Ah apologies. In your first post I read "can not" as "cannot"
  - medler 4y ago
    This study was pretty much only about TV time. It took place before handheld devices were ubiquitous in Singapore, where the subjects live
    - cynthedesign 4y ago
      Very important point for the discussion
- supergeek133 4y ago
  More people have access to screens now, and (anecdotally) parents were much more careful about screen time in the early 80s/90s.
- cantSpellSober 4y ago
  > Using EEG to try to say something about executive function has about as much legitimacy as a horoscope What? From TFA: > EEG data over the midfrontal and parietal regions have been used to delineate potential neural mechanisms of attention and executive function https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1087054717718263 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1087054717718263 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-95848-9_9 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-95848-9_... They didn't just look at EEG results either > Objective executive function assessments were administered using the Developmental Neuropsychological Assessment, second edition (NEPSY-II) ...whereas there are no scientific studies that have shown support for the accuracy of horoscopes. Any specific criticisms besides the generic "moral panic" that gets posted on every article like this?
- stevenwoo 4y ago
  They compared children starting at 12-18 months and ending at 9 years of age. This study would have been unreasonable as far as I understand it until screens got small enough to put in a crib or only include parents who hold their child in their lap while watching television or have a television adjacent to a crib.
  - scott00 4y ago
    99% of kids can sit without support at 9.2 months.[0] 97% can crawl by 12 months.[0] Kids in the 12-18 month range don't stay in the crib or a lap all day. [0] https://cdn.who.int/media/docs/default-source/child-growth/child-growth-standards/indicators/motor-development-milestones/mm_percentiles_table.pdf?sfvrsn=81f3b60b_5 https://cdn.who.int/media/docs/default-source/child-growth/c...
- CadmiumYellow 4y ago
  "screens have not changed since then" What? They've changed massively. The displays are different sizes, they're made of different materials, they're more portable, they're more interactive, the colors are brighter, the resolution is better. Our current generation of screens are ubiquitous in a way that TV was not, and they are qualitatively different. Surely the effect on our brains could be different. Not saying that this particular study is great but I don't understand how anyone can dismiss this line of thinking as nothing more than the same moral panic Socrates once had about books, or whatever. Have you not noticed changes in your own attention span, memory, and thought processes since the advent of smartphones and tablets?
  - superkuh 4y ago
    >Have you not noticed changes in your own attention span, memory, and thought processes since the advent of smartphones and tablets? I have never owned a smart phone or tablet. I use a dumb phone (Nokia 6030) and desktop (or laptop) computers. Smartphones and tablets are terrible computers, not because they have magic screen powers to influence your brain but because they have limited volume for heat dissipation/energy storage, limited network capability due to radio power constraints and random round trip time, terrible IO, locked down software, and generally are ankle bracelet like tracking devices with no way to remove the battery.
    - raverbashing 4y ago
      So you never owned a smartphone or tablet but think they're "terrible computers"? That sounds like an uninformed opinion. Power dissipation sucks on PCs because they're PCs using x86 basically.
      - red-iron-pine 4y ago
        And, like, they make ARM / RISC laptops. Lotta articles about them recently, too.
    - CadmiumYellow 4y ago
      It honestly does feel like they have magic screen powers to influence your brain. You'd likely understand what I'm talking about if you'd ever owned one. The interactivity, the high quality and brightly colored displays, the touch feedback and notifications...these devices are like brain candy. They're extremely pleasurable to use and if you get used to using them often it's very hard to pull yourself away from them.
- 1970-01-01 4y ago
  Both the use-case and the physical screen have changed so much since 1930s television broadcasts it makes me wonder if you drive a dinosaur to work.
- scott00 4y ago
  There was certainly worry about this earlier, though I don't know if there was any research done. My parents limited screen time when I was growing up (born 1985). I do think there's been a substantial change in child-targeted media over the years. In the days of broadcast only tv, you couldn't turn the tv on at any time of day and expect to find children's programming. The advent of cable and home video players changed that, but not everybody had cable and not everybody chose to buy kids show recordings. Parents could make those decisions occaisionally and then be stuck with them, rather than having to fight a continuous battle of self-control. Other big changes occurred with the rise of children's programming on youtube and the invention of smartphones. Basically in less than 100 years we've gone from no childrens screen media exising at all to an unlimited quantity available for free in every adult's pocket 24 hours a day.
- nescioquid 4y ago
  Cultural attitudes and norms have changed greatly. There would generally be one television in the house and deciding which station to watch was often not an individual decision. People would also think there was something wrong with you if you spent too much time watching television. Even into the late '90s, I recall people being disgusted and scandalized at rumors that so-and-so spends all day playing computer games. Now that everyone has their own personalized screen wherever they go, attitudes are somewhat different.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- roundandround 4y ago
  > I wonder why this effect was not discovered when screens were first invented and entered the home back in the early 20th century I wonder why I was required to sit 1.5 meters away from the screen a generation after TV entered the home. Do modern kids sit this far away from tablets?
908B64B197 4y ago
As long as it's correlations and there's no biochemical pathway it's little more than social sciences. I have to wonder if they don't have the correlation reversed, ie, parents who park their kids in front of screens at a younger age (because of disinterest) read less to them and provide a less stimulating and engaging environment for their children.
meany 4y ago
They could have the causality reversed here. In that children with cognitive impairment are put in front of screens more often. As a parent, I can say that there a few things that can give you a break better than letting the kid play on a screen.
medler 4y ago
A brief summary of what this study was about: - screen time was reported by parents at 12 months - television was the only screen time experienced by the vast majority of subjects (they explain that this was around 2010, before handheld devices were ubiquitous) - they found that at 9 years old, the children who had had more screen time at 12 months had worse attention and executive functioning at 9 years - EEG correlates at 18 months explained some of those differences at 9 years - this is in Singapore btw What blew me away was that in this cohort, the average (average!) reported TV time for the 12-month-olds time was 2 hours a day!
- in_cahoots 4y ago
  I was surprised at the 2 hour number too, but then I remembered that there are a ton of stay at home moms or parents on parental leave who have the tv on all day for background noise. Being home alone all day can be isolating, and for some people the ‘company’ of a tv breaks up that isolation.
xlii 4y ago
I'm completely out of the water, but one thing that I'm not seeing is control for ADHD which is highly heritable (depending on study there are various numbers ranging between 60-90%). I wouldn't be surprised that ADHD parents would give their ADHD children access to screen earlier (as screens are hypnotic and thus have some calming effect, so, eh, life's experience?). I'd probably change HN title: study says it's associated, but title suggest there's causation.
scott00 4y ago
It seems like they collected 5 screen time data points[0] but only present analysis of the first, collected at 12 months of age. Did I just miss the other analyses? Assuming I didn't, is it too cynical of me to infer that they ran the numbers for the other data points but found no relationship? Suggesting that screen use after age 20 months or so is substanitially less harmful? [0] Quoting from the paper: "When their child was aged 12 months, parents were asked to report the amount of time on average that the child spent on screens ... . Parents were asked the same question on their child’s screen time at 5 time points between ages 12 months and 54 months."
- giantg2 4y ago
  I also didn't see anything about the type of programming consumed. I would think this would play a big role in things like attention. A lot of the programming for kids is extremely low value - nothing of educational value, poor dialog, poor social skills/manners or violence, etc. There are even problems with the pacing a lot of times where it seems like the show is so fast compared to real life. No wonder you can't pay attention in a slow paced classroom when you're conditioned to have a 10 second attention span. I can even see some of this with my wife. She can't stand any sort of slow burn or intellectual movies, documentaries, etc. She just can't focus for that long if it's not fast paced. You can even see the general difference in pace from older movies or TV shows (like black and white old) and today.
- ProjectArcturis 4y ago
  Not at all cynical. Well, it's cynical but warranted. That's absolutely what they would have done. And because negative results don't get published in important journals, they wrote the paper emphasizing the positive result they did find.
aliljet 4y ago
Having a 4 month old sitting next to me as I write this, I think the prevailing opinion among my more woke friends with kids is, "screens are bad." As I read this, it seems to come to a correlative conclusion that screen time before 12 months causes executive function impairment as the time increases from 1 hour to 4 hours. Being a lay consumer of scientific material, I'm curious to understand if I'm reading this correctly. And man. Screens. Addiction and disability were never the goal. :(
BaculumMeumEst 4y ago
How significant of is the impairment of executive function here in the tests they gave? It was hard to find/read the data on my phone. E.g were some groups scoring 5% lower than control? 10%?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
tempaway45733 4y ago
Discussion section: "Screen time likely represents a measurable contextual characteristic of a family or a proxy for the quality of parent-child interaction."
korse 4y ago
One of my mom's credentials is a degree in early childhood development. She and her peers from that life were pretty set (since the mid-70's) that putting children younger than 12 or so in front of 'screen media' had negative affects on social and cognitive development. The rationale, as far as I understood it, is that young kids are voracious learners and screen media at it's best is a shallow and hyper focused projection of the day-to-day reality experienced by humans. Thus, any time spent on screen media equates to lost training time/data which is always a negative if you are trying to build a general purpose human being. Books which required effort to comprehend were fine, but interaction with peers, older humans and the outside world was preferable to all else. EEG readings to prove things about executive function may suck, but the conclusion still seems somewhat intuitive.
cynthedesign 4y ago
This is why there need to be better apps, games, with an enriching, artistic, educational or human-interactive component. We can never fight the flashy colors, but we could have an artistic renaissance if everyone grew up using digital art and musical collab/composition apps, global polyrythmic percussion, multilingual etc games.

I sort of thought so. The screen acts as an external cognitive attention hold and thus you do not need to as much manage your own. You can externalize your attention via screens, just like we can externalize memory to our computers, etc.

superkuh 4y ago

I wonder why this effect was not discovered when screens were first invented and entered the home back in the early 20th century when televisions came about. It really makes me doubt the entire premise as screens have not changed since then. It just seems like another unfounded moral panic like when people blamed books, newspapers, or radio for youth misbehavior. Every generation has it's own. It's weird that we've gone back to the 1940s for the 2020s moral panic. Using EEG to try to say something about executive function has about as much legitimacy as a horoscope does about how my day will go. It's amazing this passed JAMA's review to be published.

georgeburdell 4y ago
Screens are far more interactive now. Perhaps that’s a component as well
- the_only_law 4y ago
  I think this might be something to it. I’ve noticed parallels between the stereotypical “kid glued to their phone” and “elderly person glued to slot machine at the casino”. Both of those are more interactive that TV.
- miriam_catira 4y ago
  This paper is talking about screen use by infants - within the first year of life. Screen interaction can not be the major problem here, it's much more likely to be a lack of interaction with other humans. That's key to infant development, so it shouldn't be a surprise that a lack of stimulus from carers would lead to issues later.
  - martinjacobd 4y ago
    I'm not sure why it would be true that screen time is not a problem for a <1yr old. At about 6-9 months (maybe before) they are able to interact with the screen, and they interact much more with it if it has bright colors and responds to their touch. We would occasionally allow our eldest to use the phone around this age and she would become despondent if it was taken away. So we decided never to do that again. Of course, a lack of interaction with humans could be a factor too but in our case we were literally playing with it alongside her and she would still get upset if it was taken away.
    - miriam_catira 4y ago
      Not saying that it wouldn't be an issue at older ages as well, since for millenia children learned by watching the other people around them and learning from them, not from screens. That's my essential point - that's utterly essential for infants, even more at that age than later. Not that suddenly it becomes ok! But if we want to keep the discussion on topic, we should talk about the age group being studied. Beyond that, we want to have a different study. (edit, grammar because it's really too early in the morning for writing)
      - martinjacobd 4y ago
        Ah apologies. In your first post I read "can not" as "cannot"
- medler 4y ago
  This study was pretty much only about TV time. It took place before handheld devices were ubiquitous in Singapore, where the subjects live
  - cynthedesign 4y ago
    Very important point for the discussion
supergeek133 4y ago
More people have access to screens now, and (anecdotally) parents were much more careful about screen time in the early 80s/90s.
cantSpellSober 4y ago
> Using EEG to try to say something about executive function has about as much legitimacy as a horoscope What? From TFA: > EEG data over the midfrontal and parietal regions have been used to delineate potential neural mechanisms of attention and executive function https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1087054717718263 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1087054717718263 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-95848-9_9 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-95848-9_... They didn't just look at EEG results either > Objective executive function assessments were administered using the Developmental Neuropsychological Assessment, second edition (NEPSY-II) ...whereas there are no scientific studies that have shown support for the accuracy of horoscopes. Any specific criticisms besides the generic "moral panic" that gets posted on every article like this?
stevenwoo 4y ago
They compared children starting at 12-18 months and ending at 9 years of age. This study would have been unreasonable as far as I understand it until screens got small enough to put in a crib or only include parents who hold their child in their lap while watching television or have a television adjacent to a crib.
- scott00 4y ago
  99% of kids can sit without support at 9.2 months.[0] 97% can crawl by 12 months.[0] Kids in the 12-18 month range don't stay in the crib or a lap all day. [0] https://cdn.who.int/media/docs/default-source/child-growth/child-growth-standards/indicators/motor-development-milestones/mm_percentiles_table.pdf?sfvrsn=81f3b60b_5 https://cdn.who.int/media/docs/default-source/child-growth/c...
CadmiumYellow 4y ago
"screens have not changed since then" What? They've changed massively. The displays are different sizes, they're made of different materials, they're more portable, they're more interactive, the colors are brighter, the resolution is better. Our current generation of screens are ubiquitous in a way that TV was not, and they are qualitatively different. Surely the effect on our brains could be different. Not saying that this particular study is great but I don't understand how anyone can dismiss this line of thinking as nothing more than the same moral panic Socrates once had about books, or whatever. Have you not noticed changes in your own attention span, memory, and thought processes since the advent of smartphones and tablets?
- superkuh 4y ago
  >Have you not noticed changes in your own attention span, memory, and thought processes since the advent of smartphones and tablets? I have never owned a smart phone or tablet. I use a dumb phone (Nokia 6030) and desktop (or laptop) computers. Smartphones and tablets are terrible computers, not because they have magic screen powers to influence your brain but because they have limited volume for heat dissipation/energy storage, limited network capability due to radio power constraints and random round trip time, terrible IO, locked down software, and generally are ankle bracelet like tracking devices with no way to remove the battery.
  - raverbashing 4y ago
    So you never owned a smartphone or tablet but think they're "terrible computers"? That sounds like an uninformed opinion. Power dissipation sucks on PCs because they're PCs using x86 basically.
    - red-iron-pine 4y ago
      And, like, they make ARM / RISC laptops. Lotta articles about them recently, too.
  - CadmiumYellow 4y ago
    It honestly does feel like they have magic screen powers to influence your brain. You'd likely understand what I'm talking about if you'd ever owned one. The interactivity, the high quality and brightly colored displays, the touch feedback and notifications...these devices are like brain candy. They're extremely pleasurable to use and if you get used to using them often it's very hard to pull yourself away from them.
1970-01-01 4y ago
Both the use-case and the physical screen have changed so much since 1930s television broadcasts it makes me wonder if you drive a dinosaur to work.
scott00 4y ago
There was certainly worry about this earlier, though I don't know if there was any research done. My parents limited screen time when I was growing up (born 1985). I do think there's been a substantial change in child-targeted media over the years. In the days of broadcast only tv, you couldn't turn the tv on at any time of day and expect to find children's programming. The advent of cable and home video players changed that, but not everybody had cable and not everybody chose to buy kids show recordings. Parents could make those decisions occaisionally and then be stuck with them, rather than having to fight a continuous battle of self-control. Other big changes occurred with the rise of children's programming on youtube and the invention of smartphones. Basically in less than 100 years we've gone from no childrens screen media exising at all to an unlimited quantity available for free in every adult's pocket 24 hours a day.
nescioquid 4y ago
Cultural attitudes and norms have changed greatly. There would generally be one television in the house and deciding which station to watch was often not an individual decision. People would also think there was something wrong with you if you spent too much time watching television. Even into the late '90s, I recall people being disgusted and scandalized at rumors that so-and-so spends all day playing computer games. Now that everyone has their own personalized screen wherever they go, attitudes are somewhat different.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
roundandround 4y ago
> I wonder why this effect was not discovered when screens were first invented and entered the home back in the early 20th century I wonder why I was required to sit 1.5 meters away from the screen a generation after TV entered the home. Do modern kids sit this far away from tablets?

908B64B197 4y ago

As long as it's correlations and there's no biochemical pathway it's little more than social sciences. I have to wonder if they don't have the correlation reversed, ie, parents who park their kids in front of screens at a younger age (because of disinterest) read less to them and provide a less stimulating and engaging environment for their children.

meany 4y ago

They could have the causality reversed here. In that children with cognitive impairment are put in front of screens more often. As a parent, I can say that there a few things that can give you a break better than letting the kid play on a screen.

medler 4y ago

A brief summary of what this study was about: - screen time was reported by parents at 12 months - television was the only screen time experienced by the vast majority of subjects (they explain that this was around 2010, before handheld devices were ubiquitous) - they found that at 9 years old, the children who had had more screen time at 12 months had worse attention and executive functioning at 9 years - EEG correlates at 18 months explained some of those differences at 9 years - this is in Singapore btw What blew me away was that in this cohort, the average (average!) reported TV time for the 12-month-olds time was 2 hours a day!

in_cahoots 4y ago
I was surprised at the 2 hour number too, but then I remembered that there are a ton of stay at home moms or parents on parental leave who have the tv on all day for background noise. Being home alone all day can be isolating, and for some people the ‘company’ of a tv breaks up that isolation.

xlii 4y ago

I'm completely out of the water, but one thing that I'm not seeing is control for ADHD which is highly heritable (depending on study there are various numbers ranging between 60-90%). I wouldn't be surprised that ADHD parents would give their ADHD children access to screen earlier (as screens are hypnotic and thus have some calming effect, so, eh, life's experience?). I'd probably change HN title: study says it's associated, but title suggest there's causation.

scott00 4y ago

It seems like they collected 5 screen time data points[0] but only present analysis of the first, collected at 12 months of age. Did I just miss the other analyses? Assuming I didn't, is it too cynical of me to infer that they ran the numbers for the other data points but found no relationship? Suggesting that screen use after age 20 months or so is substanitially less harmful? [0] Quoting from the paper: "When their child was aged 12 months, parents were asked to report the amount of time on average that the child spent on screens ... . Parents were asked the same question on their child’s screen time at 5 time points between ages 12 months and 54 months."

giantg2 4y ago
I also didn't see anything about the type of programming consumed. I would think this would play a big role in things like attention. A lot of the programming for kids is extremely low value - nothing of educational value, poor dialog, poor social skills/manners or violence, etc. There are even problems with the pacing a lot of times where it seems like the show is so fast compared to real life. No wonder you can't pay attention in a slow paced classroom when you're conditioned to have a 10 second attention span. I can even see some of this with my wife. She can't stand any sort of slow burn or intellectual movies, documentaries, etc. She just can't focus for that long if it's not fast paced. You can even see the general difference in pace from older movies or TV shows (like black and white old) and today.
ProjectArcturis 4y ago
Not at all cynical. Well, it's cynical but warranted. That's absolutely what they would have done. And because negative results don't get published in important journals, they wrote the paper emphasizing the positive result they did find.

aliljet 4y ago

Having a 4 month old sitting next to me as I write this, I think the prevailing opinion among my more woke friends with kids is, "screens are bad." As I read this, it seems to come to a correlative conclusion that screen time before 12 months causes executive function impairment as the time increases from 1 hour to 4 hours. Being a lay consumer of scientific material, I'm curious to understand if I'm reading this correctly. And man. Screens. Addiction and disability were never the goal. :(

BaculumMeumEst 4y ago

How significant of is the impairment of executive function here in the tests they gave? It was hard to find/read the data on my phone. E.g were some groups scoring 5% lower than control? 10%?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

tempaway45733 4y ago

Discussion section: "Screen time likely represents a measurable contextual characteristic of a family or a proxy for the quality of parent-child interaction."

korse 4y ago

One of my mom's credentials is a degree in early childhood development. She and her peers from that life were pretty set (since the mid-70's) that putting children younger than 12 or so in front of 'screen media' had negative affects on social and cognitive development. The rationale, as far as I understood it, is that young kids are voracious learners and screen media at it's best is a shallow and hyper focused projection of the day-to-day reality experienced by humans. Thus, any time spent on screen media equates to lost training time/data which is always a negative if you are trying to build a general purpose human being. Books which required effort to comprehend were fine, but interaction with peers, older humans and the outside world was preferable to all else. EEG readings to prove things about executive function may suck, but the conclusion still seems somewhat intuitive.

cynthedesign 4y ago

This is why there need to be better apps, games, with an enriching, artistic, educational or human-interactive component. We can never fight the flashy colors, but we could have an artistic renaissance if everyone grew up using digital art and musical collab/composition apps, global polyrythmic percussion, multilingual etc games.