Minds on Media: The Associations between Screen Engagement and Children’s Developing Brains

2:42 Before introducing the panelists, moderator Martin Paulus, MD, Scientific Director and President of the Laureate Institute for Brain Research, discusses how cognition is constantly changing and developing, even into the early 20s, and that cognition involves several areas of the brain, including working memory. Dr. Paulus acknowledges that many parents are worried about how screen time affects their child’s brain growth and development, but notes that many factors contribute to healthy cognitive development, such as the amount of sleep that an individual gets and their baseline mental health. Dr. Paulus reminds parents that screen time is a modifiable factor that might contribute to each of these factors, in addition to being its own contributor to brain development.

13:33 Parents often ask what exactly they can do at home to help limit the negative effects of screen time. Marc Potenza, MD, PhD, Director of the Division on Addictions Research at Yale University Medical School, discusses research investigating problematic digital media use and its connection to cognitive ADHD symptoms. He then lists several important boundaries that parents can set for screen time, which include no screens during meals, no screens an hour before bed, avoiding device use for emotional regulation, creating tech free zones, balancing screen time with outside and active play time, and avoiding solitary digital activities that do not lead to social connections.

29:40 Author of How We Read Now: Strategic Choices for Print, Screen, and Audio, Naomi Baron, PhD, says that parents should encourage reading of traditional books instead of E-readers. When using an E-reader, individuals are more likely to multitask and not pay attention to the story in the same way that they do when reading a traditional book. Dr. Baron encourages parents to read with their child and to discuss the story with open ended questions, such as “Why do you think the main character made that choice?” Doing so can stimulate the brain and encourage reading comprehension. She also shares that reading longer books, especially fiction, has a positive effect on reading scores and comprehension in teens.

43:04 Addressing one of the most asked about topics, Jason Chein, PhD, Director of the Temple University Brain Research & Imaging Center, discusses the association between screen use and reduced executive functioning skills, such as working memory and inhibition, as well as the potential for screen time to alter the reward system in a child’s brain. Dr. Chein emphasizes that it is not yet clear that there is a causal relationship between screen use and executive functioning impairment. There is, however, a clear association between screen time and reduced cognitive flexibility as well as a weakened ability to sustain and control attention, which has been seen in what Dr. Chein calls “multimedia multitaskers.” Dr. Chein also shows that there is a clear connection between excessive screen time and changes in the function and structure of the brain, though the directionality of these associations is uncertain.

1:02:59 The panelists spend the final half hour of the webinar answering audience members’ questions, such as whether or not cognitive abilities can be altered or repaired if screen use is reduced and why there hasn’t been a clear causal relationship established between digital media and cognitive development. Dr. Chein discusses the ways in which the ever-changing digital landscape affects the ability to study certain aspects of digital media use, and Dr. Potenza acknowledges the unique life changes associated with the COVID-19 pandemic and how those environmental changes have impacted screen use. The experts engage in a lively and dynamic conversation about how far the field has come, where it needs to go next, and what parents can do today to help their kids lead healthier lives in our digital world.

[Dr. Pame Hurst-Della Pietra]: Hi and welcome. I am Dr. Pam Hurst-Della Pietra, president and founder of Children and Screens Institute of Digital Media and Child Development and host of our popular Ask the Experts series. Thank you for joining us today for our much anticipated webinar focusing on the complex ways that digital media impact children’s development, brain structure, and function. Over the next 90 minutes our panel of world-renowned interdisciplinary experts will discuss the risks and benefits our children encounter in terms of their attention spans, memory, creativity, ability to learn, and to think deeply and critically as they consume more and more media, as well as how they can adjust their digital media use to ensure optimal cognitive development. The group will kick us off sharing some of their cutting edge research about screen time and brains after which they will be happy to address your pressing questions. Just type them into the Q&A box at the bottom of your screen. When you do, please indicate whether or not you’d like to ask your question live on camera or if you prefer that the moderator read your question. We’re recording today’s workshop and we’ll upload a video to youtube in the coming days. All registrants will receive a link to our youtube channel where you’ll find videos from our past 37 webinars which we hope you’ll watch as you wait for this video to be posted. Be sure to check out how you can win a chance to select your very own webinar topic between today and Friday November 19th when you donate at least $100 to Children and Screens Institute of Digital Media and Child Development you will automatically be entered into a raffle to choose one of our 2022 webinar topics. The funds will support the institute in providing more terrific programming. It is now my pleasure to introduce our moderator. Dr. Martin Paulus is scientific director and president of the Laureate Institute for Brain Research where his research focuses on using neuroimaging to develop predictive biomarkers for anxiety and addictive disorders using computational psychiatry to better quantify the behavioral dysfunctions in individuals with mood, anxiety, and addictive disorders and developing a research pipeline to translate basic neuroscience discoveries into clinical useful tools. Dr. Paulus is a member of the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study ABCD which he will speak more about shortly. Welcome Martin.

[Dr. Martin Paulus]:  Thank you Pam and thank you everybody for attending today. I hope we’re gonna have an exciting set of presentations and I think we’ll try to get a related discussion going. So I’m really looking forward to this and please don’t be shy if you have questions that’s why we’re here we want to answer your questions so before we get to the speakers which uh we have uh three, two will be live and one will be a recorded speaker um let me just do a little bit of an introduction and show you a little bit of what we’ve been doing that is related to screen media activity so I will start sharing my screen. Okay so let me talk to you a little bit about screen media activity and cognition and get right into what do we mean actually by the term cognition um you know it’s a very broad uh term quite frankly it involves really multifaceted processes um so the the easiest way that you can probably kind of organize it um is into sort of three main categories sort of in that that is shown on the right hand side and the picture here the input, the storage, and the control. So let me kind of just walk you through this. What do I mean by input? Well input is sort of what you perceive um you know what you’re perceiving the concentration the attention you have to exert to perceive a particular uh outside um stimulus. The degree to which you are aroused or the degree you are awake while you’re doing the uh perception. So that’s wakefulness, then you have the um the operations related to taking what you’ve taken in and store that in your brain for further retrieval in the future or for other processing which we’ll get to in a moment. But in a storage sense you know you have what’s called working memory, working memory is basically your scratch pad memory it’s what you know you put a phone number in uh uh in the olden days before when you had to run to your phone and type it in um it’s essentially a short-term limited buffer um that you’re operating on. Then you have your long-term memory, things that happened uh you know quite some time ago that you remember at various times but then you also have the process of forgetting because sometimes it’s important not to remember something but to forget something forgetting is actually a very important active process as well so that’s part of storage operations. And then finally, you have the control over these various processing inputs and the storage process so you have you know decision making uh planning you know what the sequencing what do you what you’re going to do you know I’m going to the store and I’m going to have to get these types of items and then I’m going to pick up my my son or whatever it is you’re doing and so that’s the planning ahead. Then also the flexibility right, you might see okay I’m going to have to take one road oh I see that there’s an accident on that road now you have to take another road so you have to kind of plan to do something different so that’s cognitive flexibility. Then uh you have the the issue of uh impulse control um which has to do with uh you know which you uh when when something occurs to you do you act on it on impulse or do you act and deliberate I think well is this the best way of how I should actually act and do things.  And by and I want to emphasize this is just one way of conceptualize a very complex aspect of a very complex process of cognition but it should give you a sense that you know cognitive processes it’s not just one thing it’s many things, it involves many brain areas um and and as you can see there uh you know in terms of the complexities um it’s it shouldn’t be too surprising that it develops at different stages in the child’s, and adolescents, and even adults development some of the control processes that we’re uh exerting aren’t fully developed until the third decade of your life. So in the mid-20s um and so it really spans a number of different processes we’ll hear by some of the uh folks today really how screen media and social media activity affect these processes. So you know of course part of this is motivated by the fact that we’re very worried about the changes that are happening in front of our eyes. You know we are uh experiencing something that really we haven’t experienced before at the in the rapidity that we haven’t experienced before. You know our kids five years ago consumed extreme media activity differently than they are doing it now and they will do it differently in five years from now. So we are faced with the challenge to try to make sense out of what this does to the brain, and what the and how that affects the processes that the brain performs, cognition being one of them. So we as Pam pointed out, we are part of the ABCD study, the largest study in young kids ever conducted. It’s about 11,000 kids participating over 10 years from age 9-10 to age 19-20. And they’re basically being invited to come repeatedly during that 10 years. We do brain scans, we get all kinds of cognitive assessments, we’re asking symptom questions, we’re asking questions about the environment. It’s a very comprehensive study in some ways. But at the same time, you know our screen media activity assessment at least at the beginning was relatively limited and asked about really a short survey about you know how much tv and movies they’re watching, whether they watch videos, whether they play video games, whether they have a text or use the cell phone, computer to to chat, um whether they’re going on social networking sites, and where they’re doing video chatting, so it’s very very simple straightforward questions where the youth basically gave us information about how much they were doing because you can imagine at age ,9,10 there’s still some limited activity. But as we’ve learned over the last uh three to four years, which is how long the study has been going on, these activities have been increasing dramatically. One thing that we’re also asking is overall uh tell us how much uh screen media activity you’re doing. What we were interested in um is you know we did one study looking at what are the brain associated changes but we were also interested in um what might it affect being on uh something like fluid cognitive functioning. So what is fluid cognitive functioning? Well clearly cognitive functioning is sort of the capacity to learn, solve problems, and adapt to a novel situation which is vital for a child’s success. It’s often predictive of how well somebody will do in school, how well somebody will do in life. And again as I’ve talked about before um it’s part of cognition but it’s really a broad ability of executive function, attention inhibition processing, and all those things. What we were interested in from an exploratory approach is the relationship between screen media activity and this and this uh fluid cognitive function. And what we did was we used a kind of fancy machine learning approach just to kind of see if we can predict fluid cognitive function from a variety of different variables, and indeed if we can. The predictions are modest um so it’s not like we can tell uh with high precision but we have some predictive ability that’s shown here in this little circle. We predict about 15% of the variance which is again modest. Here are the factors that are influencing that prediction, and one of the things that was what we call a modifying factor is the weekday screen media activity, meaning how much time they spend and the direction was that more time spent predicted lower uh fluid cognitive function. This could be seen here in this particular graph among these other graphs you can see that on the x-axis it basically shows how much they’re spending time on the screen media and on the y-axis is the predicted uh change in fluid cognitive function. So you can see that you know that as more time is spent, the function overall goes down. So that’s uh that’s one way of quantifying it. And again this was a first cut at this and there’s many more follow-up studies that we need to do. Moreover, this is an association study you know, we don’t have strong causal data yet and we can discuss it. Maybe at the end is how we might actually go about doing this. But I think that just to kind of finish up with this particular uh presentation here is that um you know in addition to socioeconomic disparity factors which are also important, um that were previously associated with poor cognitive function other people have reported about this, we identified several novel and modifiable behavioral factors. We looked at participation in extracurricular activities which are positively associated, um screen media activity which are negatively associated, and also sleep duration. I didn’t talk about the other two because they’re less germane to the discussion that we’re going to have today um. But the point is that you know screen media behavior is a modifiable factor, so maybe in addition to these other factors by moderating screen media activity, we might afford our kids to have better fluid cognitive function in the future. That’s certainly what we’re trying to see. Can we provide more evidence in that direction? So that’s a short introduction um to cognitive function and a little bit of data that we’ve studied um so I’m going to stop sharing my screen. I’m going to introduce our first panelist. I’m very excited to have a great group of panelists, so our first participant will be Dr. Mark. He’s a board-certified psychiatrist with sub-specialty training in addiction psychiatry. Currently he’s the Professor of Psychiatry Child Study and Neuroscience at the Yale University School of Medicine, where he’s the Director of the Division on Addictions Research, the Problem Gambling Clinic, the Clinic of Excellence in Gambling Research, the Women in Addictive Disorders Core of Women’s Health Research at Yale, and the Yale research programming on impulsivity and impulse control disorders. So you can see he has a very very broad but also deep expertise in the kinds of topics that we’re discussing today. So I’m very excited to have Mark take over, so Mark if you want to share your screen we can get started with your presentation. 

[Dr. Marc Potenza]: Thank you very much for the kindred introduction and so I’ll be following up on uh Dr. Paulus’s talk uh on screen media activity and cognition. I have a series of disclosures with respect to gambling, gaming, legal and pharmaceutical entities, and I thought I would pick up on the the topic of the complexity of cognition um by putting it also into a developmental uh framework and the multiple factors that may influence cognition during development and Dr. Paulus touched upon a number of these including sleep, but also mental health, stress as well as individual differences that might reflect resiliency or vulnerability factors such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. And I think these are important considerations if we’re going to think about brain behavior relationships with respect to screen media activity and cognition. So one study in which we were involved was conducted in south korea and it looked at transitions in problematic internet use um in 650 middle school aged boys. This was conducted over a one-year period where at baseline, about 15 percent of the group had at-risk or problematic use of the internet and uh about 85 percent were in the low-risk group, and then at the one-year follow-up there were transitions. So about um 15 percent of those who had high risk behavior at the beginning persisted with high risk behavior and 85 percent remitted, whereas in the low risk group, about 12 percent had emerging at-risk um or problematic uh internet use uh whereas the remainder was uh demonstrated persisting low risk and so we were interested in the factors that were related to these transitions. And of a multitude of factors that were investigated, three were related to these transitions. So um more days um fewer days free of internet gaming as well as cognitive aspects of adhd and by cognitive aspects, these are planning and organizing capacities or abilities and these were linked to the emergence of at-risk or high-risk problematic use of the internet. Whereas a fewer hyperkinetic symptoms, so the um difficulties with sitting still for example uh was related to um the remittance so if there were fewer uh symptoms of hyperkinetic adhd this was linked to remittance uh over the course of the year. And as we know there are there’s a wide range of uh behaviors um that can be conducted on the internet, and gaming being one of many and that’s been a focus of some of our work as well as the focus of the diagnostic and statistical manual as well as the international classification of diseases and both of these include criteria for for DSM-5 internet gaming disorder and for ICD-11 gaming disorder. The criteria differ, but they are both getting at uh problems with internet gaming or gaming in general. So we’ve been involved in a number of different studies, looking at largely young adults and males more than females, in most cases but we’ve also undertaken meta-analytic studies to try to get at robust correlations or findings. And these uh findings shown here are from a meta-analysis so across hundreds of individuals brain imaging studies that found that individuals with internet gaming disorder had lower brain matter volumes in regions like the anterior cingulate cortex, which is been implicated in self-control and cognitive control and the ventral medial prefrontal cortex, that has been implicated in a large number of processes including decision making, emotional regulation, motivational drive. We’ve also with colleagues in China been involved in brain imaging studies, in this case looking at functional connectivity within an executive control network, in individuals with and without internet gaming disorder. What we found was that the individuals with um showed less functional connectivity in this network and that in the sample overall, the less functional connectivity was linked to poorer cognitive control assessed out of the scanner. And then in a separate meta-analysis conducted by Maartje Luijten and colleagues um individuals with addictive disorders including substance use disorder and gambling disorder show a blunted activation of the ventral striatum during reward processing, particularly the anticipatory phase of monetary reward processing. And some work in which we’ve been involved again in China has shown something similar in individuals with internet gaming disorder and how people process rewards is important for learning. I believe that this will be a topic later in the webinar. So we’ve been fortunate to assemble a group of interdisciplinary researchers and clinicians to do secondary data analysis of the ABCD data that we heard about from Dr. Paulus and glad to have Dr. Paulus among others involved in these efforts as well as Yihong Zhao who is a multiple um principal investigator on uh several grants um including a Children and Screens pilot grant that led to a National Institutes of Mental Health grant so that we can understand better brain behavior relationships with screen media activity. And we’ve been using an approach called a joint and independent variants explained to look at brain structural covariation patterns and in a prior publication we identified a joint structural covariation pattern that was linked to initiation of alcohol use prior to adulthood. In the ABCD study, we heard from Dr. Paulus that this is a large study of over 11,000 youth and their brain imaging assessments every two years in behavioral assessments every year. And a study that Dr. Paulus led um initially linked brain structural factors to screen media activity with four different factors accounted for 37% of the variants, including a factor linking cortical thinning to screen media usage. These data were cross-sectional in nature and given the longitudinal aspect of ABCD we were interested in looking at the longitudinal relationships. So in some of our initial uh analyzes hot off the presses as it were, we identified three joint components linking baseline screen media activity at age 9 to 10 to different scores from ages 9 to 10 to 11 to 12 years in cortical thickness surface area and subcortical gray matter volume. These covariation patterns involving these cortical and largely subcortical brain regions were highly reproducible with Pearson’s correlations ranging from 0.82 to 0.91. We didn’t find strong relationships with cognitive or externalizing or internalizing scores, but we did find a gender related difference in one component. This component included the brain stem largely subcortical uh brain regions including the hippocampus and thalamus, as well as the frontal pole and diencephalon. And what we saw was that there was this um difference between boys and girls. The girls are shown in red the boys in black, and we can see that and this separation particularly for the high total screen time and when we looked at the types of screen media activity this appears to be linked to a gaming behavior among the boys. So we’ve also been involved in a a Cost initiative a European Cooperation in Science and Technology that Naomi Fineberg has been leading out of the UK and um I thought it would be important to discuss one resource, and there are multiple resources um to uh think about how we might address uh problematic use of the internet. And this ebook that is available for free one can download it and if one goes to the website at the bottom of the slide. This um e-book covers multiple types of problematic use of the internet, which I think is very important because different behaviors in which people engage on the internet may have different effects on cognition and development. The booklet provides information on the course of problematic use of the internet and co-occurring disorders, covers assessment and intervention information and provides practical tips including tips for parents. So some of those tips are to consider age-appropriate content, to gradually introduce the internet in an age-appropriate fashion, and have age-related durations of internet use to balance screen time and physical activity, not permitting screen time one hour before bedtime to ensure sufficient sleep time, and to have screen free meal times. It’s also recommended to turn off digital devices when not in use, and in particular to avoid device use for emotional regulation as this can then lead into uh problematic behaviors, to create tech free zones, to balance green activity with non-screen hobbies, to have clear and consistent rules that both parents and children follow appropriately, to play video games with others and not in a solitary fashion if one is going to play video games, and to be mindful of the time that um that one plays video games, and to have regular conversations about online activities. Furthermore, it’s important to warn children about online dangers and encourage that children ask for help when cyberbullied, to teach online ethics matters and safe behaviors, be aware of one’s own technology use behaviors, be aware of notifications for example when muted to make phones distance distant when studying, and to be mindful of parental influences on child behavior because parents remain very important influence on children’s behavior throughout development, even though at times it may not always feel that way. So in conclusion, there’s still a lot that we don’t know uh regarding screen media activity and cognition particularly given the rapidly changing digital environment, however the ABCD study in particular and other studies as well offer unique opportunities to understand brain behavior relationships related longitudinally to screen media activity in youth. As I mentioned considering types and patterns the stream media activity will be important in this process, particularly for for example social media activity but also pornography use, these are behaviors in which children and adolescents engage in frequently, and resources such as the the cost initiative e-booklet as well as guidelines from organizations like the World Health Organization or the American Academy of Pediatrics exist and likely will be refined over time as more information is obtained and gets translated into improved prevention and public health efforts. So I’d like to thank a number of collaborators and funding organizations and thank you for your attention.

[Dr. Martin Paulus]: Great Marc that was uh that was fantastic um really some pretty impressive body of work. One question that came up from the audience and maybe you can respond now we can have more detailed discussions later on is whether kids who have been diagnosed with adhd, whether the brains of these kids might respond differently to screen media engagement and screen media activity.

[Dr. Marc Potenza]:  I think that’s a wonderful question, and I think it’s going to be important for us to do those sorts of studies directly to have more information on that. What we do know is that many different features, as I mentioned, appear in early studies to be linked to transitions in certain forms of problematic internet use, but we do need to understand brain behavior relationships better and maybe through resources like the ABCD study that will be possible over time.

[Dr. Martin Paulus]: great thank you uh Marc and thank you for the presentation. We’re going to have a more comprehensive discussion uh hopefully uh at the end um. Next I will introduce a video uh for our next participant by Dr. Naomi S. Baron. She’s Professor Emerita of Linguistics at the American University in Washington DC. She’s a former Guggenheim Fellow, and a Fulbright Fellow, and a visiting scholar at the Stanford Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences. For the past 30 years, she’s been studying the effects of technology on language, including the ways we speak, read, write, and think, so very much looking forward to that video and afterwards we’ll have a bit more discussion.

[Dr. Naomi Baron]: Hi, I’m Naomi Baron and I’m sorry I’m not joining you synchronously today but at least I’d like to share with you uh my thoughts and my research on your brain on reading. We’ll be talking briefly about screens, conversation, multitasking, and learning. That may sound like quite a mouthful, but they really do all go together. So let’s think about reading, in particular and your brain. But first focusing on the brain. We know that the human brain is what’s known as plastic, that is it can change over time, it’s not just the developing brain and children, it’s also as we get older. But we’re going to focus today on the children issue. A second thing we know is that our brains were not neurologically designed for reading, no surprise because literacy and writing more generally, have only been with us depending on how you count about four to five thousand years. What happens though is that as people learn to read, and this is each and every one of us our brain changes. We know the brains of people who are non-literate as adults are different from the brains of people who are literate. If you’re interested in more information on the developing brain regarding reading, I recommend the work of Stanislas Dehaene Reading in the Brain, as well as Maryann Wolf, her book Proust and the Squid. Let’s focus now on the development of the reading brain in children, and here I’ll cite some work of John Hutton at Cincinnati Hospital and some of his colleagues that show some really interesting correlations. They’re not proof, but they’re correlations between kinds of activity and what’s happening in the parts of the brain that are relevant for learning to read. So in one study done with preschool kids, Hutton and his colleagues was able to show that children who were exposed to a lot of screen use had lower and I’ll quote “lower microstructural integrity of the brain white matter tracts”, and what that means is those are areas of the brain that are necessary for developing language and the skills that become important in literacy. With that same cohort of pre-k kids, Hutton and his colleagues found that if you look at the environment and the home that is where there are things that supported the development of literacy such as access to books, and shared reading with kids, when you had less access to books and less shared reading with kids, there was that same lack of development of these tracks in the brain that are useful and necessary for language development. Finally, there was a third study this time with 8  to 12 year olds comparing how much the kids were using screens as opposed to reading, and there was a correlation between high screen use and low book reading, because they often go together correlation between those, and lower connectivity again or logically in the brain between the visual word area form form area and language. Again things that are necessary for language in general and reading in particular. So that’s sort of scary, because it suggests that at least by correlation, there are some real relationships between how much we use screens and what happens to the reading brain as kids are developing. Let’s look now at correlations with toddlers and preschoolers, and here we’re going to focus not on the brain per se but on the kinds of behaviors we engage in. We know there are lots of debates over whether it’s good or bad to use ebooks or digital apps versus print with young kids, and by young i’m talking about toddlers and preschoolers. Over the last number of years there’s been a lot of focus of the discussion on is it that the kids are focusing on the device rather than the content of stories which is generally correlated with lower comprehension scores by using ebooks and apps. So is it the problem that they’re focusing on the device, and not thinking about the story. Another issue is many of the e-books that are out there and the apps that are out there are full of bells and whistles that have nothing to do with the story, and those kinds of books, electronic books don’t tend to foster comprehension of what is being read. Part of the problem is there aren’t many well-designed ebooks and apps out there, there’s some but not a whole lot. But now let’s turn to what really matters even more than the digital versus the screen versus the print issue, and that is the kind of conversation that’s going on between the caregiver, typically an adult more typically parents and the child. There’s a term used in the reading community called dialogic reading, which basically means when you’re reading to younger kids and that’s toddlers and preschoolers and probably primary school kids, it’s important not just to read the words on the page, but to talk about what’s happening to relate what’s happening to experiences that your child has. We also know that the kinds of questions that you ask, the kinds of things you say but particularly when it’s asking questions matter, so-called wh questions that’s the who, what, where uh what why how when but particularly the why and the how questions are really important to ask about what’s happening in the book and how that relates to what else has happened in the child’s life, because the kind of answers that you’re requesting from a child are more than one word, and it’s not a yes no. You know is that a cow, yes, well that’s nice but it doesn’t get you to say why is the cow making noises, why is the cow saying moo, because that stimulates more language development. This kind of dialogic reading can be done with print and digital, but so far it seems to be easier to do with print because print is a more familiar medium for us. That doesn’t mean you can’t do it, it means you have to work hard. But now let me turn to older kids and this is research that I’ve been doing with a number of my colleagues. Particularly looking at the question of how users of various ages, so we’ve been looking at middle and high school kids, I’ve looked at university students, how they read in print versus how they read digitally. Today what I’d like to focus on is two specific questions: how easy is it to concentrate when reading in print versus reading digitally? And how often you’re likely to be multitasking when reading and print and reading digitally? So what I’ll share with you are data that are literally hot off the presses, they’re collected from uh middle and then we’re also working in high school students at the International School of Amsterdam. There are more than 400 we’ve gathered data on these were gathered within the last three weeks along with my co-investigators Anne Mangen, Kim Tyo-Dickerson, and Frank Hakemulder. So these two questions that I want to talk about how easy is it to concentrate when you’re reading in print or in a computer we had a five-point likert scale, easy on one end on the left-hand side, and difficult on the other. How often do you multitask when you’re reading in print or on a digital screen again a five point scale and it’s important to know that the statistics I’ll be reporting on are never multi-task, as opposed to frequently at the other end of the scale. So what did we find? Look at the concentration statistics, this is again from 400 uh kids is it easy to concentrate when you’re reading in print, 65 percent of them said yeah it’s either really easy or pretty easy to concentrate when i’m reading in print but when i’m reading on a computer less than half said it was easy to concentrate, 32 percent said yeah it’s easy to concentrate when reading on a computer. Now let’s look over at multitasking. Do you never or seldom multitask when you’re reading in print? A little more than three quarters said I don’t multitask when I’m reading in print, but when I’m reading a digital screen only 31 percent said no, I’m not a multitasker when I’m reading on the screen. So just do the simple math, and do the logical connections. If you’re multitasking when you’re reading, particularly reading when you’re trying to learn something, the students themselves are saying I don’t concentrate as wel,l and you know what, if I’’m looking to concentrate I do it in print better and I don’t multitask. It seems so logical but we need to draw these connections together. There’s one other point I want to make about reading. The kind of reading that students are doing when kids do matters. One of the things that matters is how long the the work is that’s being read. There’s research that shows this is what 7 to 16 year olds, that if you’re doing frequent leisure reading especially of book length works school-based comprehension scores are higher, and we know that an awful lot of the reading that we’re assigning to kids and that also goes for university students is shorter, it’s not book length works. Another correlation it’s been called the fiction effect, this was the study of 15 year olds, and the 15 year olds who read fiction, and typically that turns out to be book length works there aren’t a lot of short stories being read they had higher reading scores on an international test called the pisa than the students who didn’t read fiction. So what does all this mean, how do we put this together? I have some suggestions for parents and educators to sum up really what we’ve been talking about. The first point, remember that children’s brains are still developing through adolescence, and I’m done then but that’s the group we’re talking about now and that both the kind of media you use whether it’s print or screens, as well as the kind of conversation that’s going on, along with how much reading you’re doing with kids, how many books there are in the house that matters a lot for language development including reading development. In thinking particularly about toddlers and preschoolers, it’s important to remember that talking while you’re reading about things other than in the book is important. It can be done with books, it can be done without books. You need to talk with children regardless, but if we’re talking about books it can be done with print or digital books, but with print it tends to be a little easier. And finally with school-age children, particularly middle school and high school for which I have real data, model reading the reading that you do without multitasking. If you’re multitasking when you’re reading, don’t be surprised if your kids think that’s a fine thing to do. And similarly, model in your own reading, reading longer works including fiction it will pay off both for you and for your children. Thank you so very much. 

[Dr. Martin Paulus]: Excellent uh so thank you Naomi for doing this video for us, this is uh a very very impressive work. Um just to follow up on, there was a there was a bit of a follow-up question um and actually that raises a good point we should be discussing uh later on. Um the the issue was that when we reported on screen media activity through ABCD, was this a child report or an adult report? And in fact what we used was child report but we also have the adult report and the interesting element of this, is we did correlations between the child and the adult report, and it shouldn’t be too surprising but it is surprising um that the correlations between what the kids report how much screen media activity they’re doing and what the adults meaning the caregivers are saying that they’re doing this hereditary known. Meaning that there probably is a lot of mismatch between what parents think the kids are doing and what the kids are really doing. So um but let’s go to the next um next presentation and I’m very excited to have Jason, Dr. Jason Chang. And he’s an associate professor in the Department of Psychology Cognition Neuroscience at Temple University, and his current research in his lab investigates how development and training of working memory and cognitive control impacts the landscape of one’s cognitive abilities, including executive functioning, learning, problem solving, and decision making. All those aspects of cognition that I kind of outlined in the beginning, so I’m very excited to have Jason present and I’ll give the floor to him. 

[Dr. Jason Chein]: Okay good afternoon everybody, thank you Martin for the introduction. Uh so what I’m going to do today is I’m going to try to extend some of the arguments that you’ve heard already presented by our earlier presenters, and I’m going to take us a little bit farther along in development, take us into late adolescence and some of the behaviors that begin to emerge there. Uh where I want to begin though is with some of the sorts of things you might hear in conversations with other parents, maybe you’ve heard on the news media, out in society kids screen time habits are bad for the development of attention, kids have short attention spans today, and their executive functioning skills seem to be diminished. That’s the kind of thing you might hear. Here’s something else you might hear, technology use disrupts how kids process rewards, kids are impatient, kids today they always expect instant gratification, so as scientists these are the kinds of questions that we begin to ask. Are these things true? And as listeners today as members of society you should always be asking are these kinds of things that we hear out and about actually supported by evidence? So I’m going to refer to the constellation of psychological skills on the left here as executive control, it relates very closely to the fluid control or fluid cognition that Dr. Paulus was mentioning, we’ve also heard it referred to as executive functioning in the presentations today. The types of processes that are involved in the comment on the right, I’m going to call reward drive. How reactive somebody is, how sensitive somebody is to the rewards that are present in their environment. And again the question we’re asking is, are these sorts of claims supported? So I’m going to just spend a few minutes, weaving a little bit of a narrative in a very compressed and very oversimplified form, I’m going to extend some of the argument to new evidence from other media forms than what I think we’ve heard about already, and i’m gonna first set up the belief that these things are supported. I’m gonna show you some of the evidence that leads to these sorts of claims. But as i’m making these sorts of statements about the existing evidence, I want all of you as listeners to put on your skeptic’s hat, that is I want you to think about how these types of data might be real, that we might observe them in the laboratory and in the work that we do in ecological settings, but they might not actually support the conclusions that emerge from the sorts of comments you see in the comment bubbles on this slide. So let’s start with executive control is it true that more screen time increased involvement with digital media are associated with an impairment or with weaker executive control executive functioning and so I’m going to just again walk you through some very simple evidence there’s quite a number of studies you heard about, a few of them from Dr. Potenza, looking at internet gaming and internet addiction, and indeed these studies on mass seem to show that those individuals who are less, who spend more time internet gaming they also exhibit weaker response inhibition, less ability to control their impulses. We find something very similar, when we in my lab have been studying increased or excessive smartphone usage, and so the finding is that those individuals who spend a lot of time on their phones largely engaging with social media applications, well they perform less well on cognitive measures of flexibility, which was as Dr. Paulus presented to you part of this measure of control. And it’s the inability to switch back and forth between one task state and another one, to kind of be able to think in different ways in different moments. There’s another kind of behavior that’s become of great interest in research and there are emerging studies on, this it’s called media multitasking. And in this behavior you’re not just engaging with one form of technology or digital media, but you’re actually engaging with multiple forms of technology simultaneously. So I think a pretty typical example that you might see in teens is that they’re streaming video on one device, but at the same time they’re holding their phones in their hands and they’re scrolling through social media, and they’re trying to do these two things at the same time, they’re media multitasking. And what one of the interesting findings from those individuals who tend to be heavy media multi-taskers, is that they tend to show weaker ability to sustain, and control, and focus attention, and they show diminished diminished performance on measures of working memory. And just to show you that I’m not just making these statements, I want to show you some actual data this is from a study by Cain and colleagues, and just to orient you here what you can see is that those individuals who are heavier on their report of media multitasking, using different forms of technology simultaneously, they perform less well on a measure of working memory. It’s called the n-back working memory task, it measures continuous performance so it’s the ability to keep performing this task over time which is also sometimes used as a measure of sustained attention. So, when you put these things together, and then you look at how these different media forms affect what’s happening in the brain, and again you’ve seen some hints of these data already presented to you. What we find is that across media forms when we look at the brain’s structure and its function, we find differences in those who tend to be heavier users, who spend more time involved with these digital media forms. They also show both structural, and functional differences in parts of the brain that we know to be important for executive control. Dr. Potenza highlighted some of the midline regions of the brain,  I’ll just highline one of the outlying areas of the brain the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a region many of you have probably heard is essential for cognitive control, executive control, goal directed behavior. So you could look at these data and say yeah it looks like it’s true, screen media is associated with weaker executive control. Let’s turn to the opposite side, is it true that there’s a relationship between screen time and digital media and one’s ability to process rewards that are in their environment, their sensitivity, their reactions to their pursuit of those rewards? Well again let’s look at some of the findings, so there’s a number of studies that have looked at social media behaviors and one of the interesting and I think quite robust findings is that individuals who spend more time on social media, also tend to show increased reward sensitivity. They react more to being given rewards and they anticipate those rewards with a stronger internal sense. What about internet gaming? There are again a number of studies here, and across a number of these studies we find that novelty seeking, thrill-seeking, sensation-seeking tends to be high among individuals who spend more time internet gaming. In our own work, again we’ve focused more on smartphone behaviors and what we observe is that those individuals who spend more time on their smartphones, well they really do look like they prefer more immediate rewards. They’d rather take something smaller and less valuable now, than hold out and wait for something more valuable later. And again here what those data look like, so I’m just showing you increased smartphone use tends to go with a stronger tendency to want instant gratification. And once again, you might say oh I’m sorry, and so uh if we look in the brain again across all of these media forms, the data are highly consistent with this focus on reward drive, reward processing because among the regions of the brain that look like they’re affected, both structurally and functionally, by increased use of digital media forms are the brain regions that we most strongly associate with the ability to process and anticipate rewards in your environment. So once again, it looks like we’re affirming the claim here. And if this state of affairs is accurate, that is if screen time and digital media involvement is associated with weak executive control and increased reward drive, then here’s a way of describing the situation. Executive control has been likened to your brain’s ability to put on the brakes, to stop, think, and deliberate, and in these individuals who spend more time in front of digital media, it looks as though they have a diminished control to break. A weakened breaking system, on the other side the reward system has been likened to having an accelerator with the foot way down on the pedal, you can’t control the accelerator just go go go. And this state of affairs, a weak braking system and a particularly heavy foot on the accelerator is precisely the kinds of conditions that we’ve been studying for years that are associated with teen adolescent risk behavior. And this leads to I think an important question, is there a link not just between screen behavior, executive control, and reward processing, but between screen behavior and the kinds of risks that kids and teens are taking. And the answer, if you look across a number of studies is, yes there is a relationship here it’s true for substance involvement, it’s true for involvement in reckless driving behaviors, and the likelihood of being involved in both serious and non-serious accidents, it’s true for involvement in crime, both violent and non-violent. That is those individuals who seem to spend more time in front of the screen, also tend to show larger engagement, more engagement in these kinds of important real world risk behaviors. And again just to show you, I’m not just saying this, here’s some data from my own lab where we looked at digital media use measured across a number of different ways of assessing digital media involvement and then also self-reported risk-taking within the last six months, including these categories of risk behavior and what you see is a positive correlational relationship more risk-taking is associated with larger more involved digital media use behavior. Okay, so given this information you might try the a similar sort of quote to the ones I had in the first slide, too much digital media exposure is making teens more risky. And that’s very tempting to conclude that that’s a supported claim here. What do you do as a parent if that’s the observation that you’re making, what are the kinds of tips that you often hear, they’re not the tips we’ve given here today. If you look very closely, but the sort of advice you tend to get, and maybe your intuition as a parent or caregiver is what we need to do is cut down on screen time and digital media involvement, right remove social media, get them to spend a little bit less time in front of the screen and hope that that will diminish their involvement in these risk behaviors. But now I want to present a paradox to you, because over the last decade we know that screen involvement has gone way up, many many more hours per day being spent by our kids in front of their screens. But while digital media media use has been going way up, involvement in risky activities has been going down. And this is true for all of the kinds of behaviors that I described, substance involvement down, car accidents among teen drivers way down, involvement in crime going down. They’re spending more time in front of the screen and they’re not engaging in more risk behavior than engaging in less risk behavior. Well that raises some interesting questions about causality, about the nature of this relationship and here’s where I want you to pull out your skeptic hat and to ask yourself, is it possible that we have cause and effect going in the wrong direction, that we’ve been misunderstanding which is the cause, and which is the outcome. The way I originally presented it, it’s the screen behavior is diminishing control is increasing reward drive, and as a result increasing risk-taking. But, maybe it goes in the opposite direction, maybe it’s being riskier, having a stronger tendency to want to find ways to exhibit your exploration to sensation seek. Maybe it’s already having a weakened executive control, or a stronger reward drive that leads us to the screen. In other words, maybe we have the arrows in the reverse direction. And here’s where our strategy for how to address the problem is really important, because if our strategy is to take away the screens, to remove them from our children’s lives, then it opens the door again to their involvement in these highly consequential real worlds risk behaviors that we have seen been going down over the last decade. So I’m going to leave you with two basic conclusions, yes there really is a relationship between executive and attentional control, reward drive, and risk taking, and individuals involvement in screening behaviors. Sitting in front of the screen in whatever form that means and we can get into the details there, but we should be very cautious in drawing causal inferences from the kinds of data that dominate our fields. And the strategies that we’re going to adopt as parents, as caregivers, as teachers, as policy makers need to take into consideration the possibility that the sort of data we have, doesn’t actually support those causal inferences.

Thank you.

[Dr. Martin Paulus]: I’ll tell you Jason, that was uh uh quite uh some uh interesting twists at the very end. So uh and and I think a very important one, and I’m sure this will come up in the discussion. Um let me ask, just picked up one question that came out of the audience which is you know you make the association between cognition and screen media um behavior,  I’m wondering um you know one of the questions that came up is um can you actually modify a kid’s attention span, say um and and you know is that something that would actually then change potentially, if we go the other directions immediate behavior so any thoughts on the modification, the modifiability of these cognitive functions?

[Dr. Jason Chein]:  Yeah so I think my very short answer is yes, we can certainly modify these executive control abilities one’s attention. And there’s again, a little bit of a paradox because one of the strategies that looks like it might be fruitful is to actually stick kids in front of the screen again, that is to get them to actually play video games that train up attention, or to engage in computerized training tasks that are designed to increase executive functioning, and although there is some controversy over whether these things work, there’s a very large scientific literature supporting the claim that certain kinds of video game play, certain kinds of computerized screen based activities, actually enhance attention control and executive functioning more broadly. Now if you want to get your kids off the screen, and I certainly understand the impetus for doing that there are other approaches to improving executive control, exercise, meditation, um involvement in structured disciplinary activity, or disciplined activities have all been shown as examples of ways to improve attention span increase executive control. So I think we can do it, I think we know it’s a modifiable feature of a child’s brain, and there are, I would say there are a number of different avenues being pursued to try to really narrow down the precise approach to making that work.

[Dr. Martin Paulus]: Excellent, thank you Jason. Um so you know we heard some really uh exciting presentations and I want to again thank uh everybody for uh making these preparations. Um before we get to the general discussion, Marc you’ve been sitting here and listening in on some of the presentations any thoughts that you have to the presentation you’ve just heard, any comments you would like to make?

[Dr. Marc Potenza]: Yeah, I  think that the cautionary note about this being a changing environment where we don’t have as much longitudinal data, um to look at potential cause and effect is important to keep in mind. And it will be important for us to gather more data in what is, what has been a rapidly changing digital technology environment. That being said, you know parents have children who are growing up, and clinicians are seeing people with problems in these areas, so um it’s important for us to simultaneously um do the best that we can in those arenas with the information that we have. Yeah.

[Dr. Martin Paulus]: I can only uh 100 percent uh agree with your assessment, and I’m really actually excited that Jason brought this kind of this reverse uh pattern. And you know Marcus. you know we wrote this piece that we just published in uh Psychiatric Times about screen media activity, and the consequences and one of the key problems, and um you know just kind of want to put that out there so people understand why we’re struggling so much with this causal association. You know to make causal inferences, meaning that something is due to because of something else, and we have very limited ways in our experimental armamentarium to actually probe and prove that question. And the classic tool that we would use of course is we would take a bunch of kids, and we would say to one group of kids or you’re going to get as much screen activity as you’d like and the other group would say you know get any. And then we would basically see okay, so what happens, you know we basically would follow them up and we would say at the end um okay the ones that got the screen activity and the ones that didn’t. In what ways did they differ, now you’re all sitting out there can obviously believe that you can’t do that study it’s just not doable for ethical reasons, for a number of reasons, practical reasons.  So we we are inherently limited um as to what causal uh uh conclusions we can draw. Now there are some sophisticated uh tools and methods, um that one can bring to bear um with longitudinal data to get a closer to causation, and then those are the some of the tools that we’ll be using. But you need longitudinal data, and that’s the other element of it, you know you’ve seen a lot of um data presentations today that are survey-based, that are cross-sectional, they’re useful but again they provide limited evidence and so it is so important that we have these large studies, these longitudinal studies that will help us to better understand this. And um and so maybe let’s get into a general uh discussion um and you know so given where we are at this point in time, maybe bring it back to Jason, um what would be your suggestion um to the audience you know, how should they really uh um take this in, take the relationship in between cognition, screen media activity, risky behavior, um and and how should they deal with a situation when you know risky behaviors emerge? Is it the fault of the screen media um, how do we how can we go about evaluating that even in a specific case? 

[Dr. Jason Chein]: Yeah I mean Martin those are wonderful questions, and let me actually just go back for a second, I’ll try to come back to answer this question, but I wanted to put together some of your comments and then what Dr. Potenza had said which is to say even if we designed the perfect randomized control study, and we could observe over a longitudinal period those individuals assigned into one group and another and we could really convincingly show that there’s a causal relationship between some form of digital media involvement and the specific cognitive outcomes of interest. One of the things Dr. Potenza said I think is really essential, is that we’re in a really dynamic digital landscape right. And we could do that study, we could spend 10 years trying to make the perfect study of how much screen involvement affects a certain outcome and we get an answer, but in the meantime the digital milieu, the things that we experience in our digital world is changing, the functions, and its functionality what purpose it has for us as individuals is changing. And so we get an answer that’s a snapshot in time, that may not actually be meaningful as we go forward. So I feel like that’s important for us to acknowledge, even the perfect design might leave a lot of open questions. Okay now to the what you’ve asked me,  I think there’s a sense of frustration with waiting on science. Science moves very slowly, while the world is changing around us. And parents again caretakers, policy makers, need to come up with approaches to help intervene I think all of the tips that were up on the screen with Dr. Potenza, with Dr. Baron, they’re great pieces of advice, they’re common sense, and they make sense. With respect to risk behavior again, common sense tends to rule the day. Parents monitoring the activities of their kids limiting, moderating to some degree the way in which they get involved in digital media those are smart things to do. To flip the script again, I think probably the emphasis should be not on reducing screen time or digital media involvement, but on increasing non-screen based activities, getting kids enough time away from the screen, physically active, engaging in conversation, in face-to-face social interactions, but all of these things, while they’re relatively common sense for us to say are only loosely supported by the data that we as scientists have been able to collect. We’re doing our best, clinicians are doing their best to address what is a real problem, which is excessive or overuse of these digital media, but it is hard to construct advice based solely on what evidence is available to us. 

[Dr. Martin Paulus]: Yeah, thanks thanks jason um Marc, any any comments that you’d like to make to that? I’ve also been scanning the questions, so I have some comments to the questions that can come from the audience, but I want to, Marc I want to give you a chance to respond. 

[Dr. Marc Potenza]: Yeah I do uh agree with the number of the points about um about, the digital technology environment changing, and about um how we might think about using both common sense approaches, and trying to achieve a greater balance if you will between screen media activity and on-screen behaviors. I think, I don’t know if we’ve mentioned it too much during this webinar, but the COVID-19 pandemic has had a big impact on a lot of youth who are at varying developmental stages, and with different geographic locations, implementing different approaches, but a large number of youth needing to move from in-person types of behaviors and learning, to screen-based learning has been uh you know I think there are individual differences associated with how the children have been responding. But by and large, a number of children um have been struggling um in this environment. And and adding upon that, the the stress of living in a pandemic and the fears that are associated with that and the psychological uh stress. So over the past um you know, a decade or more and there’s been an increasing awareness of and perhaps worsening too of children’s mental health, that I think the pandemic um uh may have only uh worsened or accelerated that process. And how screen media activity fits into that um is complicated. So one study that I didn’t mention, um was a longitudinal study that was initiated prior to the pandemic and then continued into the onset of the pandemic and looked at relationships between problematic smartphone use, and problematic gaming, and psychological distress. And prior to the pandemic um, so three waves and prior to the pandemic,  problematic gaming was associated with worsened psychological stress at time two, but it wasn’t from time two to time three during the pandemic. Whereas problematic smartphone use at the beginning of the pandemic was not associated with uh psychological stress at time two but going from time two to time three it was associated with worsening psychological stress. So it suggests that one one possibility is that gaming may have become more um, may have had more benefits during the pandemic when it may have allowed youth to socialize, whereas beforehand there were other things that they could do that were more healthy, and and when more access about fearful information related to the uncertainties of the pandemic became more readily available on the smartphone, than problematic smartphone use then may have led to more psychological distress. That is largely speculative, but it’s one possibility that the data um in this longitudinal study in uh China support. 

[Dr. Martin Paulus]: Yeah yeah well I, you know I think what what’s emerging. And I’ve been scanning the the questions and the comments that came on from the audiences. We have to uh say, and and and I just want to go a little bit into uh kind of when we did some studies with the ABCD data one of the things was very clear to us, is that screen media activity does not happen in isolation of course. It happens within a certain family environment, it happens differentially within a certain socioeconomic class, it happens with with other co-existing activities, and so trying to isolate what is the effect of screen media activity on the brain or on behavior um is actually a very difficult task in numbers. I think we all kind of mentioned this at some point and that the effects are on average modest, uh I mean to say uh they used to be, we I want to really emphasize we’re not we’re not having the data here to say oh my god this is armageddon here in terms of screen reading activity, we just don’t. Um but what we I think where we’re struggling here is trying to identify for whom uh screen media activity could be problematic. And it gets back to what is innocent or part of a developing world, that we’re all part of and what is problematic. Um and you know and again when we did this study where we took all of these different factors family environment, um uh you know all the social demographic factors, and some other factors into account, it we did find some group of kids for whom increased media activity was associated with problematic associations like you know more externalizing, internalizing, those kinds of things um and it seems to be related to sort of brain developmental stages. You know like uh Jason talked about uh you know the the cognitive control part, the executive functioning, the frontal part of the brain, and the and sort of the the yin yang between that and the reward driven part of the brain. And it seems like if there is an imbalance between sort of um you know who’s in charge, there could be a problem um with probably there could be problematic outcomes. But again this is very early data, and so it is the case that it’s not for um uh it’s not a uniformly negative the screen media activity is. It gets back to something else, and then there was a question that was raised, you know what kind of other activities can we engage in to foster cognition and one of the issues that was brought up was uh this dyadic reading. You know reading with your child, um and that is a group activity it’s a social activity. It’s an interactive activity and by all means those are very important, and in fact one of the things we found in these early um and and Jason just actually brought up and Marc brought up too, kids use a screen media activity like texting, chatting, things of that nature in terms of social relationships, and when used in that context it actually is could be beneficial. And we found a small beneficial effect for the kids who are using it that way. Um so but coming back to and Jason you’ll be uh coming back to the dynamic reading I think that this is social activity I think it’s very much um something that uh uh we would want to encourage, um and it gets back to also building attention span like reading together for extended period of time, Jason.

[Dr. Jason Chein]:  Yeah no, I just wanted to touch on something you were just discussing here which is there is a uh perhaps misperception, that spending more time engaging with others online means the kids are somehow sacrificing face-to-face time. Um but this is this actually turns out to be much more complex when when we look at it empirically, it does turn out that kids who spend more time in not in digitally oriented social interactions, actually also spend more time in face-to-face social interactions. In other words, kids who are social, who tend to engage with others, like to engage with others whether it’s through a screen, or out in the real world. And so the idea that somehow they’re getting lost in these, so you know like only internet based social environments is probably wrong, and actually to extend the point another one one step further those individuals who might not engage in social interactions out in the world, are much more encouraged to do so in the social environments that are behind the screen. And so it’s an opportunity for kids who who are not getting normative socialization to actually experience it. The complicated, the the outcomes for individuals are very hard to predict but it’s not a simple story, and parents who are worried about their kids always just doing their like they’re in group chats they’re they’re in video games interacting with others those might actually be very healthy ways for them to be getting socialization when otherwise, they’d be retracted. 

[Dr. Martin Paulus]: Yeah yeah, all right I think very good point. So uh you know I’m being reminded that we wanted to bring up one issue, and I’m just going to bring those up very quickly um which is you know when we come to multitasking uh you know we talked a little about cognition, and executive functioning, and control, and flexibility, and things of that nature. Um and I think that there still is a misconception out there um about how the brain does or does not multitasking. The truth of the matter is what we know from cognitive studies in adults and in children, is that when you engage in a cognitive effortful task, reading, or listening to something, and you really pay attention to this you can’t multitask. You have the impression of multitasking, say you’re reading something and you need something else so what the brain is doing it’s switching between paying attention to one thing and switching paying attention to the other thing. But here’s the issue, the switching itself is uh costs the brain uh processing power. So so what that means is that you think you’re doing two things at once, but what you’re doing is you’re doing two things not so intense, and then spending extra brain power and brain cognitive energy uh switching between those two events. Um and that is where we come back to like the attention span, I mean so building attention being focused on one thing for an extended period of time, building deep experiences, um cannot occur in a in a multitasking environment, it just cannot. We have to be aware of that that’s not true in adults, and it’s not true for children. So one of the things that you know I would really strongly urge parents to look at is provide the kids with the opportunity to not multitask, you know sometimes we do multitask we’re switching around that’s good that’s fine there’s nothing wrong with it but also give the children time to just be with one thing. But one thing paying attention to one thing that builds depth of experience. And I think you know and again I mean maybe Jason can say a word about this you know this multitasking it’s sort of like these little dopamine juices that we’re getting from all right let me take let me pay attention to this, and maybe pay attention to that, and effectively what you’re doing you’re you’re you you you’re training to your reward system but you’re not really training your uh your cognitive system, Jason what would you say about that?

[Dr. Jason Chein]:  Yeah no, I’d love to respond there. So let me get back up just for a second by saying you know there are a lot of I think controversial claims about relationships between outcomes in cognition and specific screen media involvement in activities. What is really not controversial for any of us, is that when somebody is engaged with their screen device, they are not able to attend other things going on in their world as well as they would be if they weren’t simultaneously trying to be on their screen. We all agree about that, so in the moment it’s taking away your attention from the classroom, from a conversation, from your family, from your friends. We think that’s happening, the controversial question is whether that has a lasting negative impact on your capacity for attention whether somehow it shortens your attention span to be in the habit of multitasking with your digital devices. I think the evidence there are much less clear, and to go back to something that was in Dr. Baron’s presentation, she talked about brain plasticity. And for years and years we’ve been running studies looking at how the brain changes through experience, through practice. It’’s a kid trying to defend their digital media habits, might say well i’m just getting practice at multitasking i’m getting good at it that’s what it’s doing that’s the world that I live in and I need to get good at that so I should multitask a lot. And here’s what I think we know at this point in time, they’re probably wrong, that is practicing with multitasking as Dr. Paulus was just explaining, really isn’t multitasking you’re just attention switching. It’s not very effective, and it is definitely associated with having a weaker capacity for focused, sustained, attention. But there is again a little bit of an out, something that somebody could perceive as a benefit benefit in certain environments. And that is those individuals who spend a lot of time media multitasking they actually are more distractible, that’s bad, but also better at picking up on things that are going on in their peripheral environment. Because they’re less focused, they’re actually more aware of something that’s happening outside of what they’re doing. So it’s this peculiar you can’t say it’s all bad, it’s all good, it really depends on the context. And if I’m going to leave the parents with a message, context matters right, it really does matter when and where these kinds of activities are being manifest.

[Dr. Martin Paulus]: Marc, one question that has come up in the audience, maybe you can speak a little bit to us, you know we are digitalizing our learning environment. Kids are using laptops, they’re using pads, ipads and things of that nature. What does that do particularly for those kids who are susceptible, say to even developing addictive types of behavior in the context of of screen media use?

[Dr. Marc Potenza]: Yeah so um the relationship between uh using digital devices uh for learning and how that impacts development, I think is complex. So um some one study that comes to mind one that we were involved in with uh investigators in China, was to look at encyclopedia based traditional types of searching versus google type internet-based searching. And found that if the internet was faster, the internet-based searching was faster, um there was less uh accurate recollection um from the internet-based searching versus the encyclopedia based searching and there were neural mechanisms that were implicated in that process. Then with schools distributing digital devices for learning, it has the potential to increase the the learning of students, making things more efficient, and preparing them for a digital environment, while at the same time there’s also the potential for distraction and using the internet in ways that the children are not supposed to be using the internet. Searching for online content that could be not only distracting, but also detrimental to development. Online pornography is something that comes to mind and problems that youth can develop, and during childhood or adolescence that may impact uh their their development then and into the future. Particularly with respect to um how sexual arousal templates are developing. Um so all that being said, I think as has been pointed out these are complex issues and there’s no, you know black or white type of all good, all bad, there are nuances, there are contexts, and one needs to take these into account. Including the individual differences in youth, and their behavior, and how they may be impacted um through different life experiences. 

[Dr. Martin Paulus]: Yeah well uh thank you Marc uh thank you Jason, we’re getting to the end of uh of this segment and so um you know I think that uh I’m very excited uh and I’m very grateful to be part of this conversation, I think what’s important is that we’re going to continue to have these discussions. And what Marc just finished with you know understanding the complexities, and the individual differences requires ongoing conversations. You can’t just say this is it and now we know it and that’s it that’s not how it works but I’ll now give the microphone back to Pam for some final words, and again I want to thank the audience for sticking with us, hopefully it was exciting to you and somewhat interesting and Pam will tell us what’s coming up. 

[Dr. Pam Hurst-Della Pietra]: Thank you Martin, Marc, Jason for taking the time to share all of that rich knowledge and insights with us this afternoon. Thanks also to Naomi for sharing some great research and advice, even though she couldn’t be with us today. We appreciate all of you at home and work for joining us for the webinar as well. I’m sure there will be some very interesting dinner table conversations this evening. When you leave the webinar you’ll be asked to complete a short survey, please take a moment to let us know what you thought of the webinar. To continue learning about this topic be sure to visit our website at www.childrenscreens.com and read our tips for parents and other resources. Again be sure to check out how you can win a chance to select your very own webinar topic, for a hundred dollars you’ll be automatically entered into a raffle to choose our 2022 webinar topics. The funds will be used to support the institute in providing this excellent webinar series. Learn more on our website. We’ll post a video of today’s webinar on our youtube channel, to which we encourage you again subscribe and we hope that you’ll share resources with your fellow parents, teachers, clinicians, researchers, as well as your friends. For more from children’s screens please follow us on instagram, facebook, twitter, linkedin, etc. at the accounts shown on your screen. Join us on Wednesday November 17th as we address the recent news around the facebook files and where to go from here. It should be a fascinating and informative conversation. Thanks again for being here today, everyone be safe and well.