[ad_1]
A new study has found that young children who spend a long time playing with touch-screen devices are easily distracted.
Using eye tracking technology, British experts found that children who use a touch screen daily were faster at looking at other things, when they appeared within their field of vision on a computer screen.
Experiments found that they were also less resistant to distraction than young children, who do not use a touch screen or use little of it.
The findings feed the growing debate about the role of “screen time” in children’s development, and the increase in levels of electronic device use during the current pandemic.
According to Ofcom, 63% of children ages three to four used the tablets at home in 2019 – up from 28% in 2013.
It is believed that this number is likely to rise due to the increase in the number of devices around the house, due to the need to stay in touch during the shutdown.
“The use of smartphones and tablets by young children has accelerated in recent years,” said study author Professor Tim Smith, from the Center for Brain Development and Knowledge in Birkbeck, University of London.
The first few years of life are crucial for children to learn to control their attention and ignore distraction, early skills known to be important to later academic achievement.
read more
Professor Smith is currently leading the TABLET project in Birkbeck, which is looking at children’s use of touch-screen devices and aftereffects.
TABLET (Intentional Behaviors for Young Children and Learning Using Touch Screens) is conducted online, via short questionnaires and at the Birkbeck Center for Brain and Cognitive Development (also known as “Babylab”).
For this study, researchers recruited 40 12-month-olds who were using touch screens from infancy to preschool.
The study followed them for the next 2.5 years, introducing them into the lab three times, at 12 months, 18 months and 3.5 years.
Parents assessed their children’s touchscreen use within hours and minutes before each visit, through a question included in an online survey – “On a typical day, how long does your child spend using a touch screen device (tablet, smartphone, or laptop) Touch screen)?
During each visit, young children participated in computer tasks using the Tobii TX300 eye tracker, to measure their attention when objects appeared in different locations on the computer screens.
The researchers measured how quickly young children looked at things and how much they could ignore distracting objects.
The team found that infants and young children, who use a touch screen, were faster at looking at objects as they appeared and were less able to ignore distracting objects compared to ordinary users.
However, the study, published in Scientific Reports, did not specify cause and effect.
Study author Dr Anna Maria Portugal, at the Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden, said: “We cannot currently conclude that the use of touchscreen caused differences in attention. Children who are more distracted may be more attracted to the attention-grabbing features of touch-screen devices. Those who are not. “
The fact that children who used smartphones a lot were more likely to be distracted, the team says, can be interpreted as a positive or negative trait.
They now plan to investigate how attention behaviors “found in screen-based contexts” translate outside the lab.
“What we need to know next is how this pattern of increased search for distracting objects on screens correlates with interest in the real world,” said co-researcher Rachel Bedford, from the Department of Psychology at the University of Bath.
And last year, TABLET research published in JAMA Pediatrics revealed that young children who use a touch screen daily, are faster at finding prominent targets during visual searches.
Bedford said at the time: “We found that in both 18 months and 3.5 years, users of high-speed touch screens, faster than ordinary users, had to find the red apple.”
Source: Daily Mail
[ad_2]
Source link