Young Child Learning, Attention, and Screen Use | Heather Kirkorian, PhD

Research papers, in order mentioned

Kirkorian, H., & Simmering, V. (2023). Searching in the sand: Protracted video deficit in U.S. preschoolers’ spatial recall using a continuous search space. Developmental Science, 26(4), e13376. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.13376 

Kirkorian, H. L., Pempek, T. A., Murphy, L. A., Schmidt, M. E., & Anderson, D. R. (2009). The impact of background television on parent-child interaction. Child Development, 80(5), 1350–1359. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2009.01337.x

Kirkorian, H. L., Choi, K., & Pempek, T. A. (2016). Toddlers’ Word Learning From Contingent and Noncontingent Video on Touch Screens. Child Development, 87(2), 405–413. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12508

Choi, K., & Kirkorian, H. L. (2016). Touch or Watch to Learn? Toddlers’ Object Retrieval Using Contingent and Noncontingent Video. Psychological Science, 27(5), 726-736. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797616636110 

Christakis, D.A., & Hale, L. (Eds.). (In press). Handbook of Children and Screens, Digital Media, Development and Well-being from Birth through Adolescence. Springer.

[Kris Perry]: Hello, and welcome to the Screen Deep podcast, where we go on deep dives with experts in the field to decode young brains and behavior in a digital world. I’m Kris Perry, Executive Director of Children and Screens and the host of Screen Deep. Digital technologies have been increasingly used for educational and learning purposes in recent years, from preschool age children on up. Yet, it’s not always clear that use of digital media for these purposes is developmentally appropriate for children’s attentional networks and learning needs. Joining me today is Dr. Heather Kirkorian, Department Chair and Professor of Human Development and Family Studies in the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Heather has conducted extensive research and scholarship into these topics, and I’m curious to hear her insights on what the latest research can tell us about attention, learning, and media. Welcome, Heather.

[Dr. Heather Kirkorian]: Good to be here, Kris.

[Kris Perry]: Heather, you’ve spent decades studying the impact of screen media on attention, learning, and play in infants and young children. So, what brought you to this field?

[Dr. Heather Kirkorian]: Yeah, a little known fact is that I used to be a marine biology major. So, I started out studying something really different in college. And it turns out what I was really excited to do was –  I saw a documentary when I was a kid where they studied learning and memory in dolphins. And I just thought it was so cool how they could design these different games to play with dolphins that helps us understand what they think and know. And then I studied biology for a couple of years and realized this is not what I signed up to do. And what I was really interested in is brain and behavior, and so I switched over to psychology, because it was really the attention learning and memory that interested me. And then I was really passionate about trying to create opportunities for kids who maybe struggle in school or don’t have the same opportunities as other kids to get ready for school before they start first grade. So, that’s really what brought these two interests together around cognition, thinking, learning, memory, and media research.

[Kris Perry]: Was there an experience that brought that interest in children to the forefront?

[Dr. Heather Kirkorian]: The reason I was really passionate about that is there were a lot of folks very close to me in my life who really struggled in school and handled school really differently than I did. Their experience was really different, and that led to really different outcomes for them when they launched into adulthood. So, I was really interested in, kind of, what are the seeds that make one kid more prepared for first grade than another or experience school differently than another, and how can we help bridge those gaps?

[Kris Perry]: There are so many ways that young children are using or are surrounded by media these days, from TVs often being on in the background, to using touchscreen device apps for games and game-based learning. At a high level, what have you learned from your research about the effects of this immersion in media on children’s cognitive and attentional skills, and even their learning?

[Dr. Heather Kirkorian]: Yeah, so high level, I always tell my students the right answer is always, “It depends”. So, that’s what the research very clearly shows. It depends on what they’re doing, how they’re doing it, are they doing it alone or with other people? What’s the content? What’s the design? So, it depends on a lot of different things. There’s no universal in this field of any kind. The other high level point is that sometimes effects are bidirectional. So, sometimes it’s not that screen time is leading to some attention or learning difference, but the other way around. Some existing attention or learning difference is leading to different types of media use.

[Kris Perry]: Touch screens seem to be particularly popular for parents of preschoolers who I assume are looking to get a jump on learning for their child before kindergarten, or maybe even just as a soothing device. What has your research shown about young children and touch screen interactivity in terms of attention, development, and learning?

[Dr. Heather Kirkorian]: So we know the vast majority of what young kids are doing, even on touchscreen devices, is watching video. So, one of the things we know is they’re still just watching video and not often interacting with the screen. When they are interacting with the screen, again, it depends on the design of the media and how they’re using it. The impacts of those things depend, but it definitely seems to make a difference. So if you have one child watching a video of something and another child interacting with a video of the same thing, they might learn or pay attention to different things in those situations.

[Kris Perry]: So what aspects of the interactivity matter most in these situations?

[Dr. Heather Kirkorian]: When it comes to learning, one of the big factors seems to be how the interactivity is incorporated in the media. So, if it’s used to add all sorts of bells and whistles and mini-games and things that detract from the lesson or the story, those things tend to disrupt learning. And kids will focus more on the games or the interactive features than on the story or lesson that we’re trying to convey. But some designers will incorporate interactivity into the lesson or story, so enhance the lesson or story with those features to draw attention to the right thing at the right time, or reinforce the right thing at the right time, and that can enhance learning.

[Kris Perry]: Are there specific aspects of the child that impact the interaction with the device?

[Dr. Heather Kirkorian]: Yeah, so we know one of the biggest predictors is age. One of the biggest predictors of the outcomes for kids is age. But age is just a measure of the passage of time. What age really represents in this case are the developmental skills that we’re seeing. So cognitive development, different kinds of attention skills and memory skills, as well as experience. So as kids get older, they get more experience with different types of media and different contexts. So they get better able to learn from all kinds of things as they get older. Those kinds of things matter a lot, and especially memory capacity, how much information can they hold and manipulate in mind at the same time. That seems to matter a lot as does things like inhibitory control. So if you’re using a touchscreen device, and you’re having a hard time not just mashing every button or touching every spot on the screen, you’re going to have a different experience than a kid who can sort of sit still and be patient.

[Kris Perry]: So, thinking about the parents that are listening today and the fact that they might have a one-year-old, a three-year-old, a five-year-old, and there are sort of almost exponential leaps that occur within just a few months in those first five years of life. What age does that memory capacity or that inhibitory control you just described tend to be developed?

[Dr. Heather Kirkorian]: Yeah, so it varies across kids, but in general, the first two years or so after birth seemed to be a little bit different. And then around two years old, give or take a few months, around that second birthday, we see some changes in how kids pay attention to TV, for example. We see differences in what they learn from screens. And it’s really kind of between the two to three-year-old mark that we see pretty dramatic changes in how kids learn from screen media. And then those attention and memory skills continue to have dramatic change throughout the preschool years – so, until five or six years old roughly.

[Kris Perry]: I’ve read about this “transfer video deficit effect.” Can you explain, in simple terms, what this means and how it was discovered?

[Dr. Heather Kirkorian]: There are some much older studies from the 1970s, 1990s, 1980s that were showing some evidence of this, but it really got a lot of attention in the late 1990s. There were a couple of different researchers that were studying how well toddlers learn from different types of information. So, whether it’s a real-life demonstration or a photograph or a video or a picture book. And so there were a lot of studies comparing how kids two, three, four years old learn from these different types of media. And so a lot of these early studies were showing that toddlers, especially in that two to three year mark, were more likely to show some measure of learning from a real-life demonstration than from the exact same demonstration on video, all other things being equal. So that gap, that distance between learning from real life versus video is what we call the video deficit. The transfer deficit is just a broader umbrella term that captures things more than video.

[Kris Perry]: So, there was a study you were involved in last year that looked specifically at spatial recall after learning from screens. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

[Dr. Heather Kirkorian]: Yeah, that was a fun one. So, that study used a spatial recall task or object retrieval – different studies use different terms for the same thing. Essentially, it’s a hide-and-seek game. So it might say, “Oh Kris, watch me hide this toy, and then you can find it.” So it’s sort of a hide-and-seek scenario like that. And we either have you watch through a window, for example, so, seeing a real-life demonstration through a window, or putting a screen that’s showing like a closed circuit video feed of the same thing. So, a typical video deficit study – you’re seeing the same thing in real life through a window or on video through closed-circuit TV. And we’re curious how well kids can find that object. The older studies from the late ‘90s and after will have really simple spatial recall tasks. So they’re in a living room kind of setting and you might hide the toy under the pillow or behind the chair. So, it’s pretty easy by the age of two-and-a-half or three for kids to do this, even when it’s on video – it’s behind the chair or it’s under the pillow. So, the study that we did, I did with Vanessa Simmering, was a sandbox task. So, we hid a toy in a sandbox instead of in the living room. So, imagine now trying to find a toy under the sand in this long, six-foot-long sandbox. So, it’s a much harder task, and we can get much more precision in memory. So we don’t just measure, “Did you look under the pillow or behind the couch?” But instead we can say, “Were you a millimeter away, a centimeter away, two centimeters away?” So, we have much more precision in that measurement. And that study was with kids, four and five years old. So, the older studies suggest the video deficit disappears by two-and-a-half or three years old, we found it even in four and five year olds, using that more difficult and more sensitive measure.

[Kris Perry]: Fascinating. Is this video deficit effect you talked about playing out in everyday classrooms now that so many schools and teachers are using screens?

[Dr. Heather Kirkorian]: Yeah, great question. And I think the short answer is, “We don’t know”. And one of the reasons we don’t know is, the typical video deficit study or transfer deficit study happens in a lab setting with really controlled circumstances. So, we show the exact same thing through a window or on a video screen that’s the exact same size as that window. Everything’s the same, except whether you’re looking through a window to a 3D room or a screen onto a two-dimensional space. The research that’s happening in classrooms will compare how well kids learn from, for example, some sort of educational game that’s meant to be used by a single kiddo –  interacting with AI in a way that adapts to their learning and gives them increasingly complex items, for example – versus a teacher running a classroom with dozens of kids in it. And in some ways, that’s a really unfair test of both of those settings. It’s an unfair test of the game, and it’s an unfair test of the teacher’s skills, because there are so many things that are different. So, whether we see the video deficit where kids are learning better from the live teacher than the digital game – we don’t have the right kind of test yet to answer that question. It’s certainly plausible, but I think in a lot of the research we have right now, those two different settings – a real teacher who has expertise in teaching kids versus an AI-enabled digital game, in this case – both are good at certain types of things. And so, we’re still trying to understand what those different things are good at.

[Kris Perry]: Thinking back to the importance of age or the skill development that happens at different ages and what your study found out about how this deficit effect may persist into older preschoolers, it really makes me think about the increasing uses of screens in early childhood settings. What advice would you have for educators and care providers who are working with young children, given what you know?

[Dr. Heather Kirkorian]: Yeah, well, so one thing we know is, even though the video deficit exists or the transfer deficit exists, there are lots of things that we can do to shrink it. So, to help kids learn well from video. One of the easiest ways to do that is just repetition. So, even babies can learn pretty well from video if they see it a couple of times. One of the things video is really good for is repetition. You can watch it over and over again as opposed to a real-life demonstration. So, you can watch it as many times as you need to. So, if the goal is to help kids learn something from a video that you couldn’t teach them with something real, like show them something they would never experience in their real lives, like animals that don’t live in their environment, for example. Using repetition is a great tool. Another thing that can be really helpful for young kids with video is what we call joint media engagement, which is just having a knowledgeable person help them understand what they’re watching. So, the teacher’s role in this scenario is really important to help kids understand what they’re seeing and also connect that to the real world.

[Kris Perry]: I know a lot of discussion around children and media use focuses on screen time. But, I think we’re learning from a lot of the research these days that content may be as much, or more, important of an effect on children mentally and cognitively. How do you view the relative impact of screen time itself and its ability to displace important moments and interactions, compared to the impact of content choices in screen media for kids?

[Dr. Heather Kirkorian]: Yeah, I love this question, because I think the research is often sort of reduced down into that screen time measure, and the assumption is a displacement one. So, the assumption that when they’re using screens, they’re not doing another thing – which is true. But, when they’re not doing that other thing, the assumption is that other thing is always better in terms of learning and cognitive development. And, I don’t think that’s a fair assumption to make. I think that assumption also ignores the displacement cost for everyone in the family system. So, what might be a displacement effect, or a trade-off, for the kiddo might be a gain for the parent who really needs a break or needs to cook dinner or do something else so that they can show up for their kid an hour later. So, I tend to think of the trade-offs when I think about displacement. And the content matters, as you said, because whether that other thing kids might be doing is better for learning or not depends not only on what that other thing is, but also what the screen media content is. So watching something that’s pure entertainment without any educational intent versus playing with toys that stimulate cognitive development – that might be one kind of trade-off. But, if kids are just kind of left to their own devices without enriching materials to use or they’re sitting in the backseat of the car with nothing else to do versus watching an episode of a really highly valuable, age-appropriate educational program – that trade-off looks really different.

[Kris Perry]: I remember those days getting home after work. The kids were preschool age. They were exhausted. We still hadn’t started dinner. There was a high-quality program on for 30 minutes, which is exactly how much time I needed to get dinner on the table. And it felt to me like a reasonable trade-off. They could kind of get a second wind. I could get dinner on the table, and we were on our way into a great evening of doing other things. So, I’m really glad you made that point about how displacement is in fact a phenomenon that occurs, but how you use it, also, is under your control. There’s a way to use displacement to your advantage if you’re intentional about it. You mentioned making sure content for young children is enriching or educational. And how do parents evaluate what’s enriching or educational?

[Dr. Heather Kirkorian]: Yeah, that’s a great question, and that’s one of the most challenging things, because there’s not good information out there. Or at least the information that comes right with the media, like ratings in the app store, might not track with what the research would actually say is educationally valuable or beneficial for kids. My go-to resource for parents is commonsensemedia.org. So, that’s a place where you can look up information about content and see what experts – education experts, for example – have rated the show to be, in terms of educational value versus potentially risky content. So, that’s a good resource that parents can use to look up different pieces of information. I’ve tried to distill the research into some really tangible principles that parents could take home and use when they’re trying to pick media for their kids. But, I have also found parents can’t find that to be very helpful – what they really want are recommendations for where to go. Just where can I find content? What show is good? What app is good? And for parents who are looking for that, my easy go-to is PBS Kids content, because it’s free, and ad free, and has research behind it. So, it’s a really good resource that is accessible to everybody.

[Kris Perry]: Really quickly, would you mind sharing those guidelines? I’m personally really curious to hear them.

[Dr. Heather Kirkorian]: So some of the general principles we might recommend if you’re looking for content that’s age-appropriate and good for young kids. One of the things I try to look for is content that’s ad-free if you can afford to do it. So unfortunately a lot of the ad free content – costs money. So it doesn’t have ad revenue, so you have to pay for the app. If you can afford to do it, ad-free content is helpful because often the advertisements just distract from the lesson, they can disrupt learning and have other kinds of effects that take away from the potential benefit. I also try to look for content that is specifically designed with education in mind. So does it seem to have a really clear educational goal? And then the other thing I always try to look for is content that gives parents an opportunity to get engaged. Now if you’re using media to just take a break and get away for a minute, that might not mean sitting down and watching a show or using an app together with your child. If you can’t do that, you can come back to it after the break is over. So after an episode or after a game, you can talk to kids about what they did, what they saw, what the characters did, how they felt, what they learned. So you can use it as a conversation starting point to come back together and help reinforce those lessons.

[Kris Perry]: I know we talk a lot about potential harms or deficits that screen media may be contributing to in children. You mentioned ads, but it can’t all be bad. What have you found in your work to be positive or helpful uses of media and technology for young children’s learning and attention?

[Dr. Heather Kirkorian]: There is some research with really young kids focused on attention skills in particular. It’s a little bit hard to know whether attention is driving media use or media use is driving attention, it’s hard to tease those things apart. What’s a little bit clearer is the research on learning, so it’s really clear that even preschool-age kids can learn educational information from videos and apps and games that are designed to teach, so the kinds of things we’ve talked about: Does it have a clear educational goal, is it kind of free of really distracting disruptive information and does it use interactivity in ways that support the lesson. When kids are using materials like that they can learn the intended lesson of the app or the TV show.

[Kris Perry]: What about TV and less interactive media? Are there findings specific to TV or TV programming that you think families should know about?

[Dr. Heather Kirkorian]: Yeah, I think still most of the research is with TV only because we have more decades of research to draw on with TV, and there it’s really clear that content matters a lot. So content that’s designed for young kids with an educational goal tends to be associated with more positive outcomes from a cognitive and learning standpoint, so that seems really clear, it’s really clear young kids can learn from television. It’s also really clear they’ll learn more when they’re using it together, so it’s a lot of the same themes that apply with interactive games and apps apply with television as well, versus avoiding content that might be pure entertainment with no educational goal or potentially harmful content like violence.

[Kris Perry]: One of your studies that I absolutely love, and I’ve been aware of it for a long time, was the effects of background TV rather than direct use. Can you share a little bit about that?

[Dr. Heather Kirkorian]: Yeah, I think this is an area that’s really understudied because so often we’re studying the media use that kids have and not thinking about media use other people are using around them, or cases where the TV’s just on all day, this is true in the most recent reports I’ve seen, it was true in over a third of households in the U.S. with a child zero to eight years old. So the TV’s just on most of the time or are always in the background, no one’s really watching it necessarily, it’s just kind of a background presence. So yeah, I’ve done some research on this as have others, and we generally see that having a TV on in the background predicts less focused attention during toy play because they’re distracted by the TV, lower-quality parent-child interaction because parents are distracted by the TV. So it’s just kind of a distracting presence that’s not necessarily obvious. If you’re just watching a family interact with TV on in the background, it might look like they’re ignoring it, but it has these subtle effects that disrupt our attention in ways that can accumulate over time.

[Kris Perry]: Thinking about the modern household, I know there’s a lot of parent smartphone use. Are you aware of any research on how that might impact learning and attention?

[Dr. Heather Kirkorian]: Yeah, there is some good research on this that other folks are doing, so showing the same kinds of things, disruptions in parent-child interaction, and there’s also some research showing that when parents and children are playing together and parents are trying to teach their children things like naming objects, for example, giving them words for objects that they’re playing with, little kids, infants are less likely to learn the word when the parents are distracted by their phones during that interaction than if they’re distraction-free.

[Kris Perry]: The serve and return, the eye contact, the repetition, the smiles, the validation that comes from those face-to-face focused interactions between a parent and child are so key to their development, and it’s really helpful to be reminded that smartphones and televisions, even if you’re not focused on them, can take away, they can diminish those interactions just a little bit. And we know how… precious those minutes are in every day – most parents are so busy – they don’t have that many hours with their children each day, so I’m really glad we highlighted that. If you could take one or maybe a few recommendations out of your research and give it to a parent to help their young children develop and thrive, what would it be?

[Dr. Heather Kirkorian]: Yeah, so I think one for sure is thinking about screen time and how it can be used to connect. So we often think of screen time as disconnecting from people, so avoiding conversation or reducing parent-child interactions, and that can be true in the moment, so I try to think about how we might use media as a way to connect. So, watching a movie together and talking about it afterwards, playing a game together and talking about it afterwards, using video chat to connect with people we care about who don’t live near us. All of those kinds of uses are ways to use media to connect that support children’s development. So those are all positive uses, so I think focusing on how to connect. And then like I said before it’s also related to how we connect after media use ends, so even in those moments where parents need to cook dinner or the kinds of things we talked about earlier, and they use media to take a break so their kids are occupied and entertained in a safe way while parents do something else they need to do, you can use that after moment as a way to reconnect, so asking about what they were doing.

[Kris Perry]: You mentioned video chat and it reminded me, does the video transfer deficit effect hold in video chat as you mentioned with other video content?

[Dr. Heather Kirkorian]: That’s a great question. So some of the research finds that video chat reduces the video deficit, so toddlers will learn better from a video presentation if it’s interactive. So if you’re nodding and responding the way you are with me right now, Kris, so this kind of scenario, toddlers will learn better from that than if I were to record it and play it for a different child, so that it’s a little out of sync and awkward, they won’t learn as well from that. So we do reduce the video deficit in a lot of studies when it’s interactive.

[Kris Perry]: On the flip side, where the content young children are consuming is being created, what should content creators for young children know or do better than they’re doing right now in your opinion?

[Dr. Heather Kirkorian]: Yeah, I think this is a place where some of those general learning principles are more useful to know because media creators can create content that’s educationally valuable that makes parents’ jobs so much easier. They don’t need to know these principles and test whether the show is teaching lessons in a way that’s age-appropriate. So some of my go-to things there are using repetition well, so repeating information and repeating it in different contexts is really good for learning at every age actually, but especially for kids. So using repetition, repeating it in different contexts can really help with memory and learning. A lot of shows break the fourth wall and talk directly to the audience, but don’t give kids time to reflect and respond and that’s one thing that I wish I saw more in children’s programming, both interactive and just plain video. So not just talking directly to the audience, but giving them time to reflect and think and respond is really important. And then always keeping things child-centered. So I think one thing that we tend to overlook is just the importance of thinking about that child audience as the key audience and what do they need and want, as opposed to how do we keep them on the screen as long as possible, and what kids and families really need and want is a moment for parents to take a break or a moment for kids to get enriched and then get off the screen and do something else.

[Kris Perry]: Speaking of supporting families, you also mentioned the need for making information readily available for parents. What should content creators or app stores share in their information to help parents make better media selections?

[Dr. Heather Kirkorian]: That’s a great question. So I think one thing media creators can do pretty easily that can help families a lot is give them ideas for how to connect when the screen turns off, how do we connect what we just talked about to the real world? So giving parents a simple conversation starter so that after they take that screen break or watch a show with their kid they can have a conversation about it and make it relevant in the kid’s real world. That is really helpful for learning and also for parent-child connection. So that’s one thing media creators can do that I think is pretty easy just putting a little conversation starter at the end.

[Kris Perry]: It reminds me of one of those age-old teaching techniques, right, when you go to read a book aloud, you extend the story within that page or those pages rather than immediately turning the page and going on to the next thing, that you engage the child along the way and I think that’s a great way to involve parents in their child’s screen use or screen time. You’ve been involved with so much research in this field over time. Have there been findings or research that you’ve been involved with that surprised you, or were counter to what you thought you would find?

[Dr. Heather Kirkorian]: Yeah, a couple of things come to mind. So…one in particular is around interactivity, you asked about interactivity earlier. So I started out studying touchscreens and comparing to video, so the same demonstration on touchscreen or video, assuming interactivity would always be better, that if kids touch the screen and engage with it, just like when they use it with a real person and engage with a real person, it would always be better for learning. And what we found is that’s sometimes true and sometimes backfires and actually hinders learning. Even when it’s the exact same interactivity, different kids might benefit or not benefit from that interactivity, and I found that really surprising. And the main reason for that, and just the anecdotes I’ve seen in my research, is sometimes they learn it too well, and then they can’t generalize it off-screen. So when we ask them for an object, for example, I give you a set of toys and say, which one’s the thing that was on the screen? They don’t understand the question and they keep pointing to the tablet because they’re like, “It’s over there on the tablet, it’s not here in front of me.” That’s one thing. The other thing that I think really surprised me is early – you asked about the background TV research earlier, Kris – in that early research, when my colleagues and I were recording those videos and doing that early research when we were still graduate students, we thought, “there’s no effect of TV.” These parents sit down on the floor with their back to the TV, they play with their kiddos, and they’re not distracted at all. And it wasn’t until we started doing really fine tune coding of those videos where we saw, oh my gosh, sometimes there’s a 20, 25% decrease in parent-child interaction quality that was not clear just by observing it. So you might not experience it even when it’s happening. And I think a third way that sort of…being surprised by outward appearances not matching what’s happening in reality is we often think about kids staring at screens as if they’re kind of mindless and zoning out and not really paying attention to anything, they don’t respond when you say their name. What the research is actually showing is that that’s when kids are the most engaged in learning best and integrating information, they’re very cognitively active during those moments, even when we think from outward appearances that they look kind of mindless.

[Kris Perry]: So your first point about being surprised on interactive versus passive video findings makes me think how people may think something being engaging means it’s also good or educational for kids when in fact it’s just engaging. Do you have more thoughts on that?

[Dr. Heather Kirkorian]: I think that’s one of the things that makes it really hard for parents to know because one of the best ways parents can judge what their kids like is just how much attention are the kids paying to it? Do kids get really absorbed by it? And if so, they must love it. And it gives the parents a break, and so it seems like a win-win, it seems pretty good on all sides. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s educationally valuable. So the kinds of techniques that media creators can use to get kids to look at the screen and stay engaged with the screen aren’t necessarily the same techniques that help kids learn. So it might keep them looking without actually paying attention to the story or the lesson and understanding what they’re watching. I think the kinds of things that parents can look for there are things like repetition. Like I said before, is there educational content in there? And if kids are – seem to be enjoying it and they’re engaged and there’s also educational content embedded in it, then it’s probably pretty beneficial. But if it just seems like a lot of salient stuff, lots of movement, lots of sound effects, things happening really quickly, then it might just be capturing and holding their attention without really engaging their imagination or their learning.

[Kris Perry]: You’ve already had such a stellar career and have brought so much good information to us, but what’s next? What do you want to research about children, learning, and digital media?

[Dr. Heather Kirkorian]: Thanks, that’s really kind Kris, thank you. Yeah, one of the things I would love for us to be able to do more as a field are intervention studies where we can really test what we would call causal mechanisms. So in what cases is screen time actually causing differences? We know so much about how things are associated, but it’s hard to know – the chicken and egg problem is a little bit hard to solve. And there have been some really successful examples of that, there are a couple of researchers that have done really great intervention studies where they send families home with a tablet loaded with math games, for example, or other kinds of games and then test kids’ math skills after eight weeks. So we can do these kinds of studies, but they’re hard to do, they’re costly, and so we really need to have research investment to be able to do that kind of thing. That’s one thing I would really love to see more of. I think another thing that we’re  really just starting to do as a field that I think we’ll have a lot more of in the coming years is really connecting what’s happening in the brain early on and how we respond to media when we’re using media and how that might relate to brain structure and function later on. We’ve got the technology to do that kind of thing now even with really young kids, and it would be really great to see that tied into the research on learning outcomes.

[Kris Perry]: It’s one thing to research media use and another thing to live in our digital world. How has your work informed your own media use or that of your family?

[Dr. Heather Kirkorian]: I dread answering this question a little bit because I think I probably have more to say about the things I should be doing as opposed to the things I’m actually doing. Knowing a lot about the research has made me feel very guilty about a lot of my media practices. I think one thing that I…the ways that it definitely shaped my family interactions when my stepdaughter was really young, we would pretty much only use TV when we were watching it together and we would always talk about the content, so that was a big thing for us, and as I said earlier, using media as a way to connect. We also were more likely to play games together, digital games together or tabletop than to watch videos together, so that was more of a “sometimes food.” Video viewing was a “sometimes food” for us, we were more often gaming. The things that I probably shouldn’t be doing that I do is things like keeping my phone next to my bed and it’s the last thing I look at before I go to sleep and the first thing I look at when I wake up and I know I shouldn’t be doing those things, but here we are anyway.

[Kris Perry]: Heather, thank you so much for sharing your insights today on how children’s attention and learning are impacted by their digital life. Listeners can explore this topic further in the chapter you authored in the forthcoming Handbook of Children and Screens, Digital Media, Development and Well-Being from Birth Through Adolescence. And thank you to our listeners for tuning in. For a transcript of this episode, visit childrenandscreens.org where you’ll find a wealth of resources on parenting, child development, and healthy digital use. Until next time, keep exploring and learning with us.