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Children who use increasing amounts of social media perform lower on tests of reading, vocabulary, and memory in early adolescence than those who use no or little social media.
That’s according to a new study that suggests a link between social media use and cognitive impairment in teens. the The results are published in Gamma.
“This is a really interesting study,” says the psychologist. Mitch Prinstein at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who was not involved in the new research.
“It confirms a lot of what we’ve been hearing from schools across the country, which is that kids are having a really hard time focusing on being able to learn like they used to, because of the ways social media has changed their ability to process information, perhaps.”
While most previous research has focused on the impact of social media use on children’s mental health, “it is important to understand how social media use during school hours specifically impacts learning, especially since many schools are considering phone bans right now,” says the study author and pediatrician. Jason Nagata From the University of California, San Francisco.
A look at reading and memory
To understand this, Nagata and his colleagues used data from one of the largest ongoing studies of adolescents, called Study of Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD).. Scientists have been following thousands of teenagers as they go through adolescence to understand the development of their brains.
The ongoing study surveys children about their social media use every year and gives them a battery of learning and memory tests every two years. Nagata and his colleagues used data on more than 6,000 children, ages 9 to 10, who scientists followed through early adolescence.
They classified the children into three groups based on their evolving patterns of using social media. The largest group, consisting of about 58% of children, used little or no social media over the next few years. The second largest group, about 37% of children, started out with a low level of social media use, but by the time they were 13, they were spending about an hour a day on social media.
The remaining 6% of children – called the “high growth social media group” – were spending about three or more hours a day by age 13.
“Dose effect”
All groups were given a battery of tests to measure their cognitive performance at the beginning of the study and in early adolescence. For example, Oral reading recognition test Check their reading and vocabulary skills. Another test is called Picture vocabulary testAsk them to match the correct pictures with the words they heard.
“What was noticeable to me and perhaps surprising was that even the low level [increasing] “Social media users, those who had about one hour a day at age 13, performed on average 1 to 2 points lower on reading and memory tasks than non-social media users,” Nagata says.
The high-increment group performed up to 4 to 5 points lower than non-social media users.
“Those with the highest social media use had lower scores, but even low users had smaller differences in their cognitive scores,” Nagata points out.
“This really speaks to the dose effect of these [apps]”, says the psychologist ling At the University of Calgary, who wrote Accompanying editorial To study. “It’s a problem in really high uses, but it’s also a problem even in small doses.”
While a difference of a few points in test scores may seem insignificant, “it’s important to understand that children are a moving target,” explains Prinstein, who also Head of Psychology Strategy and Integration In the American Psychological Association.
“Even a small change in their appearance after a short period of time means that they are now indicating a different trajectory than others. This means that two, three, five years from now, we could be talking about some very large gaps between kids who may have been heavy users or not heavy users.”
and Other recent research Hours spent on social media appear to increase later in adolescence, Nagata points out. “We expect that when they are 15, 16 or 17 years old, their use will be much higher,” he adds, which could lead to larger gaps in cognition and learning in later years.
In previous studies, Nagata’s team used the same data from the ABCD study and found other troubling trends among underage social media users.
they I found that the majority of children Nearly two-thirds start using social media before they turn 13, with the average user having three social media accounts.
As they found High levels of addiction-like symptoms With smartphones between the ages of 10 to 14 years.
“Half of kids with smartphones said they couldn’t track how much time they spent on their phones,” Nagata says. “A quarter of those who use social media say they use social media to forget about their problems. 11% say social media use has negatively affected their schoolwork.”
An important time for brain development
Adolescence is a critical period for brain development, Prinstein points out, as the brain adjusts its structure based on experiences.
“After the first year of life, adolescence is the time when we experience the most growth and the greatest brain reorganization of our lives,” he says.
In a Recent studyPrinstein and his colleagues found that teens who use social media heavily have brains that are more attuned to being on social media, with “quick and constant reactions,” Prinstein says. “What we’re finding is that kids become hypersensitive to the kinds of likes, comments, comments, and rewards they might get from their peers.”
He adds that these results help explain the results of new studies. “It makes perfect sense that if their brain is growing to be ideal for social media activities, it may not be optimized for other things they need to do, as we saw in [new] “Studying.”
The new study “also gives us good enough evidence that we really need to put in place some really specific policies around setting age limits, for example, on social media apps,” Madigan says.
Denmark announced last week that it plans to impose a law Social media blocking for users under 15 years old“, notes. Australia requires social media companies to “take reasonable steps to prevent Australians under the age of 16 from creating or maintaining an account” from December 2025.
Madigan hopes other countries will take this into consideration. “I think we’ll see a minimal impact on that. That will be really helpful for the kids.”