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February 28, 2019
photopigment cells signal your brain that it is a time to be alert.
blue light is far stronger when one is looking at a small screen held close to the face—as most people do with smartphones and tablets—than for larger screens such as televisions, which are viewed farther away.53
meta-analysis of sixty-seven studies of the impact of screen time on children and adolescents found that screen time, particularly in the last hour prior to sleep, is related to sleep problems, primarily resulting in fewer nightly hours of sleep and poorer sleep quality.
90 percent of American adults use their electronic devices within an hour of bedtime at least a few nights a week.56
Harvard Medical School examined the effect of reading from an e-book compared to reading from a paper book on nighttime sleep and morning alertness
Compared to reading from a paper book, reading from an e-book led to an average of ten minutes longer to fall asleep, delayed melatonin onset by an hour and a half, reduced melatonin release an average of 55 percent, reduced valuable rapid eye movement sleep by twelve minutes, and reduced morning alertness.
One study found that adults who routinely slept less than five hours a night were more likely to incorporate misinformation in their morning report of either photos or videos that they had observed before bedtime; some even reported that they had seen video footage of an event that never happened.61
THE IMPACT OF TECHNOLOGY ON DIVERSE POPULATIONS
CHILDREN AND TEENS
younger generations believe that they can multitask better than older generations, their real-world behaviors and performance suffer when they concurrently engage in activities using multiple forms of media.2 These performance decrements, which occur despite superior cognitive control abilities in this age group, may be exacerbated by the fact that children, teens, and young adults have grown up in a world where technology
cognitive control functions, does not completely mature until a child reaches young adulthood. We also know that the cortex does not complete its development, particularly in the area of the “social brain” (defined by neuroscientist Sarah-Jayne Blakemore and her colleagues at University College London as including the medial prefrontal cortex, temporal–parietal junction, posterior superior temporal sulcus, and anterior temporal cortex), until young adulthood.
American Academy of Pediatrics recommended that “television and other entertainment media should be avoided for infants and children under age 2 and used minimally for children over the age of 2.”
trends, with children using digital media for an average of 5.5 hours per day with the predominant media platform being television (3.5 hours per day), and a shift to Internet-based media beginning at around eight years old.
According to two recent studies, three out of four K–12 teachers asserted that student use of entertainment media (including communication tools such as social media) has hurt students’ attention spans a lot or somewhat, 87 percent of teachers reported that the use of technologies is creating “an easily distracted generation with short attention spans,” and 64 percent felt that digital media “do more to distract students than to help them academically.”
Dr. Rosen’s lab examined the relationship between media use among children, preteens, and teens and “ill-being,” which included physical health, psychological issues, behavioral problems, and attention difficulties.
The more media children, preteens, and teens consumed daily, the less healthy they were. In addition, preteens and teens were less healthy as they played more video games
Pew found that 59 percent of seniors report that they go online, representing a 6 percent increase in just one year. Strikingly, 71 percent of Internet-using seniors go online daily while another 11 percent go online three to five times a week. Another study found that older adults attempted to multitask with two or more forms of media for more than 90 minutes a day.
A recent study examined the effects of background music on the ability of adults of all ages to perform a simple task of matching faces. While all adults, young and older, rated the background music as distracting, only the older adults did not perform as well with background music as they did with silence.29 This is suggestive of challenges older adults may have in the modern open-plan office workplace.
older adults found that the older adults were the most negatively impacted crossing an intersection when distracted.31 Given earlier studies showing the dangers of multitasking and walking, coupled with increased smartphone usage by older adults, it is important to recognize that they may face more potential safety hazards when walking and using technology.
World Health Organization examined the research on driver distraction and concluded that while all drivers are impaired by their use of technology while behind the wheel, older adults face special problems because of their decreased visual and cognitive capacities, which make it even more difficult for them to combine driving with any other task.33
CLINICAL CONDITIONS The symptomatology
ADHD
Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, as well as ADD without hyperactivity, is on the rise among five- to eleven-year-olds, with estimates indicating an increase of 25 percent over the past decade.
Given the literature suggesting that children and teens multitask more than any other group, those with ADHD are facing what the researchers have termed a “bottleneck,” in which executive functions and cognitive control are stalled.
A recent study by researchers at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital examined cognitive processing decrements in adolescents with and without ADHD as they drove in a driving simulator under three conditions: talking on a cell phone, texting on a cell phone, and a control condition where they drove without additional potentially distracting tasks.
Regardless of whether they had a diagnosis of ADHD, adolescents who texted while driving exhibited signs of driving impairment: they drove more slowly, their speed was more variable, and their position in the lane was more variable than when they drove with no additional tasks.
Talking on the cell phone served to reduce the variability of their lane position but did not affect speed.
However, when driving in a simulator, under all conditions, even without the use of additional tech, those adolescents diagnosed with ADHD showed both more variability i...
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“the combined risks of adolescence, ADHD, and distracted driving.”
2011 report, the American Academy of Pediatrics Council on Communications and Media declared that social media might be a potential cause of “Facebook Depression”
Those teens and adults who had more Facebook friends and who talked on the phone more often showed less depression. Although this was only a correlational study (albeit while factoring out many alternative explanations), it suggests that having more Facebook friends and being able to talk to them directly on the telephone may be helpful in ameliorating depressive symptoms.
increased use of the Internet for social reasons (including instant messaging and social media) predicted less depression and less compulsive Internet use, which was related to how satisfied the adolescents felt with their social support, their self-esteem, and their coping strategies, which the authors assert are part of the youths’ abilities to moderate their cognitive control abilities.
college students have found similar results.45 In terms of the causal directionality of these conclusions, the impact of social media posts on symptoms of mood disorders was informed by one study that actually directed college students to post more than usual on Facebook for one week. At the end of that short time period, the students reported feeling less lonely as a result of feeling more connected to others.
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee concluded
Facebook use and mood is not that Facebook causes loneliness but that it is more likely that people tend to use Facebook more often when they are lonely.
in a recent controversial study, researchers manipulated the items that Facebook users would see on their wall to include either more positive posts or more negative posts. They found that after viewing more positive posts users would post more positive messages themselves.51 The reverse was true for negative posts, suggesting that emotional content encountered online is “contagious” and spreads from person to person as they attend to messages that then promote similar internal feelings.
Narcissistic Personality Disorder
Researchers Jean Twenge and Keith Campbell have presented evidence that over the past two decades the level of narcissism in college students has increased dramatically.
three different uses of technology predicted increased symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder: having more Facebook friends (the opposite result found for depressive symptoms), using Facebook more on a daily basis, and using Facebook more for managing one’s impression including posting comments and/or posting pictures of oneself.
Autism has as one of its characteristics a rigid focus of attention on objects or details and difficulty switching focus—possibly reflecting pathology in the striatum or frontal lobes—clearly indicating the presence of a cognitive control deficit.
In looking at technology use among those with ASD, one possibility is that individuals with more severe symptoms or lower intellectual functioning may spend more time using less cognitively demanding media, such as television; while those with milder symptom presentations may have increased engagement in a wider range of activities.
What information consumes is rather obvious: It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it. —NOBEL PRIZE–WINNING ECONOMIST HERBERT SIMON1
