Abstract
Digital media has profoundly changed how children nowadays read, play, socialize, and spend their free time. These new experiences could potentially have benefits and drawbacks to cognitive development. Such topic has been a source of many mixed findings and heated public debates.
That?s the context that inspired our new study. We estimated the impact of different types of screen time (watching, socializing, or gaming) on children?s intelligence. The ?special seasoning? of our study was that we accounted for the confounding effects of both genetic predispositions and socioeconomic backgrounds. If unaccounted for, these factors could mask the true impact of screen time on children?s intelligence. For example, children born with certain genes might be more prone to watch TV and, independently, have learning issues. The lottery of genetics is probably a major confounder in any psychological process, but until recently this has been hard to account for due to heavy costs and technological limitations.
We analyzed 9855 children from the USA who were part of the ABCD project. These children had genotype data and took cognitive tasks at baseline (age 10) and after two years. At baseline, time watching (r?=?? 0.12) and socializing (r?=?? 0.10) were negatively correlated with intelligence, while gaming did not correlate. After two years, gaming positively impacted intelligence (standardized ??=?+?0.17), meaning that the children who played more video games at age 10 had the highest gains at age 12. Socializing had no effect. And, unexpectedly, watching videos also benefited intelligence (standardized ??=?+?0.12), contrary to past research on the effect of watching TV.
Broadly, I believe our results are in line with research on the malleability of cognitive abilities from environmental factors, such as school interventions and the (the very cool) Flynn effect.
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