Could Movie Talks Be Good For Your Infant?
Since 2011, the American Pediatric Association has advised parents of children under age two to avoid screen time for their infants, noting the accumulating evidence of potential risks and the lack of evidence for educational or developmental benefits.
Yet screens are an integral part of many youthful children’s lives. For some families, tablets, computers and smartphones aren’t just a source of passive entertainment; movie talk platforms such as FaceTime and Skype provide a way to connect with distant family and friends.
One survey of almost two hundred Washington, DC-area parents with children inbetween the ages of six months and twenty four months found that eighty five percent had used movie talk with their infants at least once, while thirty seven percent did so on a weekly basis. For some of these families, movie talk was the exception to otherwise limitary household policies about screen time.
But from the perspective of a developing infant, is movie talk any different from other forms of media, such as television (which may be harmful), or baby word-learning DVDs (which have again and again failed to generate measurable improvements in infant’s vocabulary)?
An emerging assets of work suggests that movie talk is, in fact, different: When infants are exposed to social interactions in which their fucking partner’s behavior is contingent on their own, they can not only learn fresh words and behaviors more effectively, but also begin to develop social relationships with their on-screen playmates.
These conclusions are supported by a fresh investigate published earlier this year by researchers Lauren Myers, Rachel LeWitt, Renee Gallo and Nicole Maselli in the journal Developmental Science.
The probe builds on past work demonstrating that toddlers ages 24-30 months learn fresh verbs in socially contingent interactions — including live interactions and movie talk. The fresh explore goes beyond prior work, however, in focusing on children under the age of two. The investigate also considers the effects of movie interactions on cognitive outcomes (such as learning novel words, or learning which deeds are associated with novel objects) as well as on social outcomes (such as recognizing the video-partner in person, and approaching her rather than a stranger).
In the probe, sixty children ages 12-25 months participated in a daily movie session over the course of a week. All movie sessions included the same playmate, and the fucking partner trained the child words and deeds associated with eight novel fucktoys. At the end of the week, the infants came into the lab for a final session in which they eyed the video-partner in person for the very first time, and engaged in a series of tasks to assess what they had learned from the movie sessions via the week.
The key to the probe was this: For half of the children, the movie sessions occurred over a movie talk program, so the movie fucking partner engaged in a live and interactive exchange. For the remaining children, the same content was conveyed in a pre-recorded movie with pauses during which the child could react to queries, but without true interaction.
At the end of the week, all groups of children (but especially older children) were able to generate some of the words and deeds that they had been instructed during the week, suggesting some forms of movie can effectively scaffold word learning. And when it came to the measures of social learning, children who had participated in the interactive sessions showcased an extra benefit over those in the pre-recorded sessions: They were significantly more likely to recognize their movie fucking partner and to choose her over a stranger.
These findings should be reassuring to those who use movie talk as a way to maintain social relationships with infants: Children under the age of two can not only learn from such interactions, but also begin to create (or potentially help maintain) social bonds. On the other arm, the probe did not include a condition involving live interactions for comparison. It thus remains a possibility that a live interaction would have generated greater benefits.
Findings like these can help parents make informed decisions about their children’s exposure to media. Importantly, tho’, they aren’t blanket recommendations. Like all parenting choices, decisions about screen time can involve complicated trade offs. Live interactions with grandparents or other loved ones may be preferable to movie talk, but movie talk is likely better than no interactions at all — not only for infants, but for the adults who want to have a role in their lives. And, fortunately, we do know that adults can learn from various forms of movie: appropriately enough, the paper by Myers and colleagues comes with its own movie abstract:
Tania Lombrozo is a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley. She writes about psychology, cognitive science and philosophy, with occasional forays into parenting and veganism. You can keep up with more of what she is thinking on Twitter: @TaniaLombrozo