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

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&#x27;s own. It&#x27;s weird that we&#x27;ve gone back to the 1940s for the 2020s moral panic.<p>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&#x27;s amazing this passed JAMA&#x27;s review to be published.

It seems like they collected 5 screen time data points[0] but only present analysis of the first, collected at 12 months of age.<p>Did I just miss the other analyses?<p>Assuming I didn&#x27;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?<p>[0] Quoting from the paper: &quot;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.&quot;

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.

I&#x27;m completely out of the water, but one thing that I&#x27;m not seeing is control for ADHD which is highly heritable (depending on study there are various numbers ranging between 60-90%).<p>I wouldn&#x27;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&#x27;s experience?).<p>I&#x27;d probably change HN title: study says it&#x27;s associated, but title suggest there&#x27;s causation.

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.

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, &quot;screens are bad.&quot; 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&#x27;m curious to understand if I&#x27;m reading this correctly.<p>And man. Screens. Addiction and disability were never the goal. :(

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&#x2F;composition apps, global polyrythmic percussion, multilingual etc games.

One of my mom&#x27;s credentials is a degree in early childhood development.<p>She and her peers from that life were pretty set (since the mid-70&#x27;s) that putting children younger than 12 or so in front of &#x27;screen media&#x27; had negative affects on social and cognitive development.<p>The rationale, as far as I understood it, is that young kids are voracious learners and screen media at it&#x27;s best is a shallow and hyper focused projection of the day-to-day reality experienced by humans.<p>Thus, any time spent on screen media equates to lost training time&#x2F;data which is always a negative if you are trying to build a general purpose human being.<p>Books which required effort to comprehend were fine, but interaction with peers, older humans and the outside world was preferable to all else.<p>EEG readings to prove things about executive function may suck, but the conclusion still seems somewhat intuitive.

A brief summary of what this study was about:<p>- screen time was reported by parents at 12 months<p>- 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)<p>- 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<p>- EEG correlates at 18 months explained some of those differences at 9 years<p>- this is in Singapore btw<p>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!

How significant of is the impairment of executive function here in the tests they gave? It was hard to find&#x2F;read the data on my phone. E.g were some groups scoring 5% lower than control? 10%?

<i>Discussion section: &quot;Screen time likely represents a measurable contextual characteristic of a family or a proxy for the quality of parent-child interaction.&quot;</i>

As long as it&#x27;s correlations and there&#x27;s no biochemical pathway it&#x27;s little more than social sciences.<p>I have to wonder if they don&#x27;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.