So in order to figure out if it's really screen time that's causing it, you can look at kids who spend a lot of time on screens, versus kids who don't, kids who spend a lot of time on screen, and participate in sports, versus kids who spend a lot of time on screens, and don't. "And when you've got 12,000 kids, you can then control for a lot of things. And then we'll be able to see as they escalate their use, and they come back and get their brain scanned again, whether there have been changes," Dowling said. "We have these snapshots of their brains now. We were all surprised when results from the scans of 4,500 participants showed evidence of differences in the brains of some of the heaviest users of electronic devices. The NIH researchers allowed us to visit test centers in California and Maryland as they began their first MRIs and interviews with nine and 10 year olds. The likelihood that they have an impact on brain, and cognition, and social development is pretty high." And they're very engaging, very interactive. "I mean, clearly kids spend so much time on screens. "I think the screen time component really came into play because we were wondering, what is the impact?" Dowling said. Gaya Dowling of the National Institutes of Health explained that project was initially looking at the impacts of alcohol, drugs, sleep patterns and sports injuries might have. The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study will follow more than 10,000 kids. Our questions about the impact of screen time on kids' brains coincided last spring with the beginning of the largest government study ever attempted of adolescent brain development. He warned that interaction with a parent or caregiver is being replaced by technology, and his guidance for parents is simple: Toddlers "need laps more than apps." Christakis tells Anderson Cooper that toddlers are increasingly using mobile devices to self-soothe, rather than learning to do that on their own. Harris was a former manager at Google and one of the first Silicon Valley insiders to reveal that apps were being designed by software engineers to capture and keep users' attention. We first began looking into this when we met Tristan Harris in the winter of 2017. The reporting on "Screen Time" allowed us a peak into early research that may answer that riddle. However, it's extraordinarily difficult to find well-established neurological studies that can determine whether all that swiping, scrolling, and texting is actually shaping the development of his young mind. I need to look no further than my own living room, where there seems to be a loud nightly struggle with our 14-year-old son over the hours he spends staring at his smartphone. It's pretty easy to find the parent of a preteen with strong opinions about the amount of time their children spend on smart phones or tablets. As with all scientific research, there is also a risk of publication bias.Editor's note: 60 Minutes' Guy Campanile has produced two reports with Anderson Cooper on the impact mobile devices may have on the brain. These results are promising, but more research is needed to determine the connection between improved assessment scores and everyday tasks in participants' lives.įuture research should address the risk of inadvertent experimenter bias and the risk of attrition bias in this study, as both the Lumosity and crossword groups had approximately 50% attrition rate. In it, half of the 4,715 participants who completed the study trained five days per week, for fifteen minutes each day on Lumosity while the other half did online crossword puzzles as an active control.Īfter 10 weeks, Lumosity users improved more than the control group on our assessments of working memory, short term memory, processing speed, problem solving, fluid reasoning, and overall cognitive function. Lumos Labs conducted a randomized study of Lumosity brain training and published the results in a peer-reviewed research journal.
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