Children are exposed to screen media at increasingly younger ages, and the press - both popular and scientific - have displayed knee-jerk reactions, claiming that this is intrinsically bad for children's development, dampening their creative play instinct, risking increases in ADHD and turning young children into mesmerised, passive observers instead of energetic, active participants. In response to this growing trend, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended a total ban on screen exposure before 24 months - an unrealistic reaction to something which has nowadays become a normal part of childhood life.
MODERN LIFE
Recent surveys in the US indicate that by three months of age, the majority of babies have been exposed to infant-directed films, and that from 12 months most children will spend between one and two hours per day regularly in front of a screen. Such figures appear alarming, but modern life is becoming increasingly digitalised and there is little point in fighting it. The challenge for parents and teachers, therefore, is not how to abolish TV/DVD viewing from pre-schoolers' lives, but rather how to control its use and make the most of its learning potential. In an attempt to address this challenge, we review the latest scientific research into the relationship between screen exposure and child development.
A SCIENTIFIC APPROACH
Though commercial pressures may affect adults' choices of programming, research has shown that pre-schoolers often make their own decisions about what they watch. They display boredom in front of some programmes, while others successfully hold their attention. So what makes positive pre-school viewing?
Repetition is one important criterion. Studies show that a DVD whose content changes continually will be less attractive to the young viewer than one with lots of repetitive scenes.
Predictability is another vital factor. Preschoolers like to be able to anticipate what will happen next.
Repetition enables them to do this, as do stories or scenes that portray familiar events. This is why media content that resembles events in their real lives tends to hold toddlers' attention for longer.
Another critical design feature involves ensuring that infants move their eyes during screen exposure, rather than staying mesmerised by the centre of the screen. It is important that objects move dynamically across the whole screen and the infant tracks such movement. High-contrast colours that clearly separate foreground from background are also essential to hold the young viewer's attention.
In other words, a good DVD or TV programme based on infant scientific research will ensure that actions, vocalisations and sequences of images are repeated several times to allow infants more opportunity to process and remember them, and are presented in high-contrast colours with objects moving across the entire screen.
While watching a screen may seem to be a simple and rather passive act, it actually involves complex cognitive processes. First, children must translate a 2-D representation into a 3-D object, while simultaneously relating what they are viewing to real-world knowledge in order to make sense of it.
These are among the reasons why young children find it harder to learn from video footage than from a live model, termed the 'video deficit effect'. For example, research indicates that toddlers who are shown how to use a new object on screen find it harder to replicate the action than toddlers who watch a live model do the same action. Nonetheless, it is clear that from a young age, babies do draw a distinction between images on the screen and real-world objects.
Those who object to screen exposure and claim that first-hand experiences are the only truly valuable ones, forget that children cannot experience everything first-hand. Seeing static pictures of, say, elephants or space rockets in books may in fact be less informative than tracking dynamic images of them moving across a screen.
Children living in inner cities, for example, may rarely be able to compare in the real world the biological flight of a bird with the mechanical flight of an airplane, so screen exposure to these flights may enhance their perceptual knowledge and help them to conceptualise their knowledge. Indeed, research has shown that if 12-month-olds are given two almost identical plastic toys of a plane and a bird with outstretched wings, in their pretend play they will make them move in very distinct ways despite their perceptual similarity. This indicates that they have conceptualised the toys in two different categories: vehicles or animals. Such knowledge can be enhanced by media exposure, since many toddlers will not have directly experienced these different types of flight close-up.
AGE-RELATED DIFFERENCES
Research has shown that from at least six months of age, infants can successfully encode what they observe on screen, store it in memory and later generate imitative actions on the basis of this stored information. Below this age, the learning potential of infant-directed screen material is limited. However, by 12 months, children can and do learn from watching good quality infant-directed programmes.
With this in mind, and since TV/DVD viewing is here to stay, what can parents and teachers do to positively enhance this media experience? Studies have shown that if children are provided with appropriate prompts in the context of a shared experience, the impact of screen exposure on learning increases.
Data clearly demonstrate that once they reach toddlerhood, children become more sensitive to the content of programmes and can acquire new information from them. And this effect is maximised if an adult co-viewer is involved. This is because the adult (usually a parent or teacher) provides 'scaffolding' (descriptions, labeling, pointing), making what is being viewed more salient to the child. Adult-child interactions have the potential to increase comprehension and learning from screen exposure.
LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
Perhaps because it is the easiest to measure, much of the scientific research into the effects of screen exposure on children has focused on language acquisition. The findings have pointed to the need to control and limit, rather than eradicate, screen exposure in young children's lives. Indeed, the data on language are fairly clear: vocabulary is best learned under conditions of live social interaction.
The reasons for this are obvious. Language-learning normally involves what psychologists call 'triadic interaction': mother looks at an object, attracts baby's attention by shifting her eyes from baby to object and back, then points and names the object. She establishes, and responds to, their joint attention.
Screens do not, so far, respond to the viewer's reactions. Nonetheless, studies also show that word learning, though dependent mostly on social interaction, can be successfully supported by programmes that incorporate explicit prompting routines.
One way in which screened media can benefit infant learning is by controlling the stimulus load that a child faces. Real-world events involve many dimensions simultaneously: space, time, actions, sounds and emotions. Processed together, these can be confusing to the young mind. When young children are overwhelmed by an experience (overloaded by the multitude of details requiring simultaneous processing), their instinct is to turn away. So, unlike real-world situations, infant-directed media can control the different elements that may distract a young child from learning.
It turns out that sound can be distracting while viewing. One study showed that the imitation abilities of children at six and 18 months old were disrupted by the addition of a music soundtrack during a video demonstration. What was designed to enhance an experience actually added significant cognitive overload for the child.
A nice example of this is shown in designing DVDs for illustrating number. It is better to accompany displays of two objects by two drumbeats and three objects by three drumbeats than to accompany all object displays simply by background music. Children need to form a meaningful relationship between visual and auditory input. In the real-world learning situation, it may not always be possible to limit the cognitive load, so this is an area in which clever use of well-designed infant-directed programmes could really support learning.
CONCLUSION
With most children having significant screen exposure from an early age, and teaching at all levels becoming increasingly computer-based, it is common nowadays for toddlers to be more computer-literate than their grandparents and for children to type better than they hand-write. These are facts that don't always sit comfortably with parents and teachers. However, there is currently no evidence to indicate that screen exposure causes attention deficits, reduces learning or rewires the brain in negative ways.
Moreover, if used in the right way, studies show that repetitive sequences, carefully designed and targeted at specific ages, can benefit certain areas of learning.
Annette and Kyra's next article will be published on 17 March.
TIPS FOR ENHANCED VIEWING
As long as they are never used as a babysitter nor as a replacement for other means of stimulation and entertainment - creative play, books, outdoor activities, storytelling - then infant-directed programmes can stimulate young minds and encourage learning. Parents and early years practitioners must remain mindful of the following:
- - Evidence exists to indicate that TV left on in the background distracts children from the serious business of play with objects.
- - In the same way as reading books, adults should take part in the media experience by watching television and DVD programmes with children, asking them questions, making comments, and having children anticipate what will happen next, so that screen exposure is a shared cognitive and social activity.
- - Group viewing can be particularly successful if the contents of the programme are discussed in the nursery or backed up by relevant play at the end of each session of screen exposure. For instance, if lining up objects, sorting them by shape, size or colour, or making specific sounds were part of the activities shown on screen, teachers should encourage children to re-enact them in pretend play sessions afterwards.
- - It is advised to keep the length of TV/DVD viewing relatively short (ie, no longer than the length of looking at a story book). Television sets should then be turned off either at the end of the chosen programme or at the instant the infant/toddler loses interest and is no longer viewing actively.
- - A good habit for toddlers is to learn to turn off the TV themselves, adding closure to the activity in the same way as a game or book are tidied away. TV should never be left on in the background.
- - Children should neither sit too close to nor too far from the screen. The distance, which depends on screen size, should require young children to move their eyes actively when tracking moving objects across the screen.
REFERENCES
- Allen, R & Scofield, J (2010) 'Word learning from videos: more evidence from two-year-olds', Infant and Child Development 19(6), 553-661
- Barr, R, Zack, E, Garcia, A, & Muentener, P (2008) 'Infants' attention and responsiveness to television increases with prior exposure and parental interaction', Infancy 13, 30-56
- Christakis, DA, Zimmerman, FJ, DiGiuseppe, DL, & McCarthy, CA (2004) 'Early television exposure and subsequent attentional problems in children', Pediatrics 113, 708-713
- Courage, ML, & Setliff, AE (2010) 'When babies watch television: Attention-getting, attention-holding, and the implications for learning from video material', Developmental Review 30, 220-238
- Foster, EM & Watkins, S (2010) 'The value of re-analysis: Television viewing and attention problems', Child Development 81, 368-375
- Mendelsohn, AL, Brockmeyer, CA, Dreyer, BP, Fierman, AH, Berkule-Silberman, SB & Tomopoulos, S (2010) 'Do verbal interactions with infants during electronic media exposure mitigate adverse impacts on their language development as toddlers?', Developmental Review 30, 577-593
- Stevens, T, & Muslow, M (2006) 'There is no meaningful relation between television exposure and the symptoms of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder', Pediatrics 117, 665-672
- Zimmerman, FJ, Christakis, DA, & Meltzoff, AN (2007) 'Association between media viewing and language development in children under two years', Journal of Pediatrics 151, 354-368
MOTHER AND DAUGHTER
Annette Karmiloff-Smith studied in Geneva with Jean Piaget, where she completed her doctorate, and is now a Professorial Research Fellow at the Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, Birkbeck, University of London. She was awarded a CBE for her work on cognitive neuroscience, and is the author of eight books and over 200 scientific articles and chapters. Her research covers infancy to adolescence across numerous cognitive domains, with a particular speciality in infants with genetic syndromes.
Kyra Karmiloff has a BSc in Anthropology and an MSc in Psychological Research Methods from University College 
London. Before giving birth to her three sons, she was a research assistant at the Centre for Studies in Language at Cambridge University.
As well as being a novelist, she is co-author with her mother of three books on child development and on language acquisition.
