A study carried out for Scientific Reports on American children looked for a correlation between the use of screens and intelligence. The study looks at different sectors, such as social networks, videos or games, and finds interesting results.
The study has major political and social significance. It is often thought that screens are rather harmful for children, however the latter can hardly do without them. Technology represents for our darlings a major asset that they must know how to use. Thus, it is important to ask ourselves how to benefit from it, without however abusing it.
Children and their screens
The study is based on more than 9,000 American children aged 9 to 10. According to the study, children aged 8 to 12 spend an average of four to six hours of leisure a day on their screens. These hobbies are divided into three categories: playing video games, watching videos and socializing on the networks.
On average, boys spend twice as long as girls playing video games. They also watch more videos, while girls spend a lot more time on social media. This is hardly surprising, as gender socialization pushes boys towards video games, and many more games are created to please them. On the contrary, girls are much more encouraged to socialize with each other, which explains their overrepresentation on social networks.
The study also corrected for the effect of socioeconomic class and genetic differences. Genetics matters a lot in the development of cognitive abilities, according to many previous studies. Socio-economic class also has a big impact on the time children spend on their screens, but also on their school performance and their attendance at work. Indeed, parents from lower social classes spend on average more time at work, and will have less time to devote to their children’s homework, or fewer financial resources available for tutoring. The study therefore corrects for the effects of these factors in order to identify a correlation. A final factor corrected in the study is perseverance, a character trait that could alter children’s performance.
Video games top the list
The researchers tested their hypotheses as follows: they first asked 9-year-old children the time spent on screens, and classified their activities, then measured their intelligence. Two years later, they made new measurements on the same children.
Intelligence is understood here as the ability to learn, reason, understand and adapt. These elements are represented in the study by five tasks of the American ABCD test: a vocabulary exercise, two attention tests, a written and oral comprehension exercise, and a memory exercise.
The results show a positive association between video games and intelligence: children who play video games at the start of the test obtain better exercise scores after two years. This result is hardly surprising, since previous studies had already demonstrated the cognitive benefits of video games. Contrary to all expectations, children who watch TV also obtain better scores after two years, although this correlation is much weaker. This totally unexpected result changes according to the education of the parents: the correlation disappears when this variable is added. We can think that the education of the parents influences the quantity of videos that the children watch, or the quality of the videos viewed. This last point puzzles researchers, and deserves more attention in future research.
It is important to note that intelligence encompasses only a number of cognitive abilities, and that many others are important and influenced differently by video games and screens in general. In addition, other activities influence other essential capacities: it is first a question of offering children a healthy and balanced lifestyle.
On the same subject :
Parental control: the Assembly votes a law in favor of a “default” installation on connected screens
Source : Scientific Reports
39