Impacts of digital technologies on cognitive development

“Is technology good for cognitive development is about as relevant as the question, is food good for physical development?” (Bavelier et al. 2011)

By Pascal Kolbe

16 Januar 2018

The discussion around using digital technologies in schools is usually approached with a black and white mindset.

Either technology is bad for kids or it is good. The quote above ridicules this approach and so in this article I want to adhere to a more diverse analysis of the effects of digital technologies on cognitive development, considering both, the good and the ugly. This diversification process should already begin with “digital technologies”. As every technology is likely to have a different effect on the brain, I decided to limit myself to the effects of television, educational computer games and action/entertainment computer games.

A number of confounders to begin with:

Many of the current results regarding the topic might be confounded by the Mozart effect. The Mozart effect predicts that increases in cognitive arousal and mood lead to an increase in IQ test performance. Since this is only a temporary effect researchers might be led to make conclusions about cognitive development, while they are simply observing a temporary phenomena. A second confounder is due to displacement theory. In one study replacing entertainment games with educational games on the subjects computer leads to positive effects, while in another study replacing school with educational games might lead to negative outcomes. Researchers should be careful about these and other confounders when they are interpreting their data and not publish their results on medium telling the world how video games are either bad or good. Having looked at two of the most common confounders let’s start looking into the results of cognitive science research on the topic, starting with the television.

Television:

A general observation that was made about a decade ago is that if one compares between a group of students that had a television and between students that did not have one, the test-results of the group who had a television were slightly better.

The effects of television programs that are targeted at pre-school children is quite diverse. On one hand several research was done on “Sesame Street”, which turns out to be associated with outcomes like increased school readiness, vocabulary size and numeracy skills, while on the other hand research on another show called “Teletubbies” shows the opposite effects.

Educational computer games:

Like having a television, having computers or not predicts school readiness and academic achievement. In this section we will look closer at educational computer games and their ability to carry the effect they have on pre-schoolers forward.

Since the workforce of the 21st century will likely demand people to function efficiently in technology-rich environments using technologies, especially educational computer games, within schools seems to turn from a trend into an educational necessity. Next to building children’s digital soft skills, educational software has proven to be efficient in teaching children math. In contrast with this finding though it has proven detrimental with common reading softwares, mainly due to the higher efficiency of classic teaching methods (displacement theory). This shows that content matters and while educational games can sometimes lead to a reduction in skills, action games can lead to an improvement in basic, but crucial, attentional, motor and visual skills.

Entertainment computer games:

While some research shows that action video games are correlated with a lower level of verbal skills, recent research regarding the effects of action games has brought up surprisingly many positive results. Next to attentional, motor and visual skill improvements regular gamers display greater cognitive flexibility and an enhanced ability to process big amounts of information, showing itself in 7–10 year old action gamers functioning at adult levels regarding their temporal dynamics of attention. But computer games are probably better for training cognitive and motor skills instead of content learning.

So to give an attempt at an answer regarding the impact of digital technologies on cognitive development, I guess it is save to say that there are both benefits and risks involved with using new technologies with children, but if we do our research and we learn how to utilize the benefits of these mediums, we will be able to increase the cognitive capacity of our children, prepare them for the 21st century and if we do it well, prepare them for life .

Further Reading:

Impacts of Digital Technology on Cognitive Development | Study.com We are surrounded by digital technology all day every day. Digital technology refers to anything that is computerized…study.com

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3170902/

Children, wired — for better and for worse — by Daphne Bavelier et al.