Screen time and executive function

[Dr. Jason Chein] 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. 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? 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 be kind of able to think in different ways, in different moments. 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. And what- one of the interesting findings from those individuals who tend to be heavy media multitaskers 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.