Box makes idiots of kids in minutes! –– The pioneer --21.9.11

ARCHANA JYOTI
NEW DELHI

Too much TV is bad for a child's T health -this is the worst fear of any parent. However, a new study has warned that even nine minutes of viewing a popular fast-paced tele-show is enough to immediately impair mental functioning of four-year-olds.
“This is a fact about which parents of young children should be aware,“ cautions the study, which is published in the latest edition of Pediatrics, official journal of American Academy of Pediatrics.
Researchers Angeline S Lillard and Jennifer Peterson from Department of Psychology, University of Virginia in Virginia had conducted study on 60 four-year-olds who were randomly assigned to watch a fast-paced television cartoon or an educational cartoon or draw for nine minutes.
The subjects were then given four tasks tapping executive function, including the classic delay-of-gratification and Tower of Hanoi (a puzzle game) tasks.
Researchers found that children who watched the fast-paced television cartoon performed significantly worse on the executive function tasks than children in the other two groups when controlling for child attention, age, and television exposure.
“Just nine minutes of viewing a fastpaced television cartoon had immediate negative effects on four-year-olds’ executive function. Parents should be aware that fast-paced television shows could at least temporarily impair young children’s executive function, ” said a researcher.
Within the realm of entertainment television, fast-paced shows seem particularly likely to have a negative impact on attention, one reason for this being that rapidly presented events capture attention in a bottom-up fashion, involving the sensory rather than prefrontal cortices, the authors noted.
Thus, fast-paced television would do nothing to train internally controlled (pre-frontal) attention over the longterm. In the short-term, the effort to encode rapidly presented events could tax children’s executive resources.
In contrast, the researchers noted, when adults are presented with televised events in more rapid succession, more resources are allocated to encoding those events, presumably depleting resources that could otherwise be available for other aspects of attention.
For the fast-paced show, the scene completely changed on average every 11
d re seconds; even within the scene, char g acters were almost constantly rapidly g moving through space. The educational ltelevision show had a complete scene change every 34 seconds on an average.
e “In addition to the pacing, we 1 speculate that the onslaught of fantas tical events that was also present in the fast-paced show might have further exacerbated executive function.
Moreover, watching a full fast-paced cartoon programme could be more detrimental,“ said the researchers seeking further study in the matter.