The study, which involved 266 pre-school and primary school children between the ages of three and nine, found that the longer the daily use of screen media, the slower the capacity to develop mental imagery. This finding applied not only to passive screen use, such as television, but also to 'active media', such as smartphones, tablets or PCs.
Dr Sebastian Suggate of the University of Regensburg, who co-wrote the report, said, 'Mental imagery enables us to depict events or objects as if they were in front of an "inner eye". These imagination and mental imagery abilities are an important component of cognitive development, including thinking, problem solving, language, and imagination.
'For the purposes of this study, we developed a mental comparisons task, where children were asked a number of questions featuring a sensory judgement. For example, "What is pointier, a nail or a pin?" Or "What is shinier, a trumpet or a violin?" Children then had to press a large buzzer as quickly as they could, to indicate which item they thought was shinier, sharper or rougher.
'This task was chosen because children cannot answer it based on learned pieces of information and the only way to solve it is to create a mental image of it and then compare it to the other object. Researchers recorded reaction time and accuracy and found that the children with more screen time were slower to pick the right answer compared to children who had little or no screen time.
The children's age did not seem to matter in terms of screen time and the effect was discernible in both samples. On average, the children spent about one hour per day with screen media, the majority of it being television. However, the average of 10 minutes per day on active media was enough to show links with lower mental imagery.
The theory is that screens provide almost exclusively visual and auditory experiences, possibly to the detriment of other senses. When watching movies, for example, the images conveyed via the screen are ready-made and presented to the viewer. The independent creation or addition of images, as is required when listening to or reading a language, is no longer necessary.
The study focuses on statistical averages and despite elevated levels of screen-time, certain children may receive enough compensatory activities, such as outdoor play and good quality language interactions, to still have good mental imagery skills.
Importance of real-world experiences
However, Dr Suggate said, 'This research likely means that we need to be careful about providing children with experiences for which they are uniquely primed to learn with in their early years. This probably includes sensorimotor interactions with their environments, because this enables children to play in a way that supports their development.'
The scientists conclude that screen media cannot replace activities that require and stimulate mental imagery, such as spoken language, reading loud, physical and imaginative play. In addition, children should be given sufficient opportunity to be active and creative in the three-dimensional world and a 'careful use of screen-media' is recommended.
'What we did here,' Dr Suggate explained, 'was take an exciting new avenue of research that has been emerging in recent decades one step further, by showing just how important sense and motor experiences in early childhood are. This new line of research has begun to experimentally investigate how the vast majority of our thoughts are anchored in real-world experiences that need to be made with an active human body. It seems that this also applies to screen-time.'
More information
The project was supported by the Software AG Foundation.
Suggate, S. P., & Martzog, P. (2020). Screen-time influences children's mental imagery performance, Developmental Science. DOI: 10,1111/desc.12978
The research is currently available here:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/desc.12978
