A paper was recently published in the journal Pediatric Exercise Science reported that higher levels of screen time were associated with higher cognitive processing scores. This study got significant media coverage (e.g. here, here and here)for this unexpected finding in a world where we fear that screen time is rotting our children’s brains. So what’s going on here?
First of all, the study was a rare longitudinal look at screen use – tracking kids in Finland from between the age of 6 and 8, for 8 years. As anticipated in a study like this, the number of kids dropping out was pretty high – they started with 506 kids with only 277 remaining by the 8-year follow up. So it’s not a huge sample, which is important when the claim is this unexpected, but this kind of attrition is entirely typical for a study of this scale.
Participants self-reported physical activity, non-screen-based sedentary activity and screen time, as well as having some digital tracking of their physical activities. Parents responded to these questionnaires in the first and second phase, but for the 8-year follow up, the teenagers completed the forms. Self-report is always an interesting issues – but so much of our research on screens and kids uses some form of self-report data that I’m not going to get too hung up on that here.
What I am worried about is the measures that were used to assess cognition – and how they are interpreted in light of technology use. They used the CogState brief test battery – assessing things like processing speed, attention, visual memory and working memory. This is done on a tablet, measuring how quickly the participant clicks on a changing card, or makes a decision about the card.
Now, I’m hoping you’re all thinking the same as me – this looks like exactly the type of thing kids who spend a lot of time on screens probably get good at! Tapping quickly when things change is almost the definition of what it takes to be successful at many video games…
So perhaps the only thing we can learn from this study is kids who spend a lot of time using screens get better at doing the type of things they do on screens. And while processing speed is often defined as a foundational element of cognitive ability or considered an element of general intelligence – there’s nothing in this study that suggests any association between getting better at this test and IQ or general cognitive ability.
