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The impact of digital media on children’s intelligence

nature.com

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Re: The impact of digital media on children’s intelligence

#61

Post by cestith »

deepGem wrote: post #35
mrtksn wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall, when I was a kid the games were extremely addictive for me and I couldn't just quit playing unless I absolutely have to. I had emotionally very similar experience when quitting smoking, the feeling that if I just can have this one more smoke I will be satisfied and live happily thereafter is very similar to the desire to have one more round. So I wouldn't call games "not addictive". If anything, watching so…

Borrowing shovelware. This is gold Jerry!

That's a somewhat popular term already. It was especially useful in the days of shareware/careware and close-source freeware distributed largely on CD or dial-up BBSes. You'd buy a CD with 650 MB of content, and depending on the publisher it might be 1/4 or 9/10 just crap.

Re: The impact of digital media on children’s intelligence

#62

Post by odessacubbage »

christophilus wrote: post #5

I’ve tried to encourage my wife to choose video games over Disney+ when she needs to drop the kids in front of something, but she still has a strong resistance to the idea that games are better. To me, it’s pretty obvious. The kids problem solve when gaming, and are obviously engaged. When watching TV, they look like zombies. I think my wife’s biggest hang up with games is that she was always told that they rot your…

games are such a personal experience that is simply much easier to talk about them at length. i also think that even if you are very blackpilled about the dark patterns at work in many modern games, it is still very easy to appreciate the value of something like the logical journey of the zoombinis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eePTsHpp1eI, sam and max: hit the road https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yWnnk9fyJE, or the zachtronics games https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o99hbZy8CuE&list=PLdg60-Uktz...

in what may be somewhat more of a hot take, i would argue that there is an incredible amount of educational value to be found even within the most meritless garbage games as they are still fundamentally systems to be dissected and solved and learning the maximally efficient way to do something worthless is a skillset that transfers quite handily to the valuable things in life. also unlike tv, games have a lot of potential to be immensely collaborative [or competitive] and social. some of my fondest childhood memories were going to my friend's house and co-oping diablo with one of us controlling the mouse and the other controlling the keyboard. there are many far less ad-hoc ways for kids to share games and even singleplayer is a highly rewarding shared experience.

Re: The impact of digital media on children’s intelligence

#63

Post by Aeolun »

mdrzn wrote: post #2

"At baseline, time watching and socializing were negatively correlated with intelligence, while gaming did not correlate. After two years, gaming positively impacted intelligence, but socializing had no effect. This is consistent with cognitive benefits documented in experimental studies on video gaming." So it's confirmed? Gaming > Socializing? /s

Only if you optimize for intelligence accoring to the standards in the article.

Intelligence does not directly correlate with either success in life or happiness (I believe intelligence is negatively correlated with happiness).

Re: The impact of digital media on children’s intelligence

#64

Post by da39a3ee »

They say that some of their main conclusions change if they control for parental education level, which they did not do. So that makes it all sounds questionable. Plus I've never heard of the journal; don't be misled into thinking it's a high profile Nature journal. Someone else here says it's a low quality journal.

Re: The impact of digital media on children’s intelligence

#65

Post by thenerdhead »

If this study has you scratching your head about the impact of digital media, do have a read of "Four arguments for the elimination of television" by Jerry Mander.

The arguments included in it are no different than many of these new studies coming out. If you grew up to be a latchkey kid and had your fair share of TV/video games/etc, it might give you perspective into things you never thought about.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3NBEurnIqY

Re: The impact of digital media on children’s intelligence

#66

Post by jcranberry »

dash2 wrote: post #13

The fact that they "controlled" for genetics using polygenic scores already is a strong sign of low quality research. Polygenic scores are powerful, but they contain very large amounts of noise compared to the true genetic effects. Controlling for genetics using them is like controlling for income by asking whether the respondents own a Porsche. Also, be aware that Scientific Reports is, if not quite a predatory jour…

They also did a post hoc analysis using parental education instead of SES by the suggestion of a reviewer and the video game correlation persisted.

Re: The impact of digital media on children’s intelligence

#67

Post by carbocation »

I don't think the problem is that polygenic scores are noisy. (You can choose to make them less noisy by restricting to significant SNPs, for example.) And noise doesn't require directional bias. But to me there are 2 problems:

(A) Polygenic scores for behavioral traits may be estimated in GWAS where the null assumptions (e.g., that mating is not conditioned on the trait being estimated) may not be valid[1]. That is on top of the issues that we usually face for other phenotypes (e.g., more routine population stratification due to geographic history).

(B) The authors did not describe the (genetic) ancestral background of the children being studied. Current techniques are biased across ancestries, for most traits, when using polygenic scores[2]. Certainly adjusting for 20PCs in the final model, as the authors seemingly did, would not be expected to make the scores comparable unless all of the children are from a close ancestral group.

With these sources of stratification, the polygenic score represents more (and less) than the trait that you're hoping it estimates; it also encodes population stratification.

As such, I hardly think this study can be interpreted.

1 = https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-28294-9

2 = https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6563838/

Re: The impact of digital media on children’s intelligence

#68

Post by twofornone »

Aeolun wrote: post #63
mdrzn wrote: post #2

"At baseline, time watching and socializing were negatively correlated with intelligence, while gaming did not correlate. After two years, gaming positively impacted intelligence, but socializing had no effect. This is consistent with cognitive benefits documented in experimental studies on video gaming." So it's confirmed? Gaming > Socializing? /s

Only if you optimize for intelligence accoring to the standards in the article. Intelligence does not directly correlate with either success in life or happiness (I believe intelligence is negatively correlated with happiness).

Do you have a source for that? Happiness I can believe, especially because of the correlation between intelligence and neuroticism, but if IQ is a valid proxy for intelligence then I think the consensus is that intelligence strongly correlates with success.

Re: The impact of digital media on children’s intelligence

#70

Post by barbecue_sauce »

dash2 wrote: post #13

The fact that they "controlled" for genetics using polygenic scores already is a strong sign of low quality research. Polygenic scores are powerful, but they contain very large amounts of noise compared to the true genetic effects. Controlling for genetics using them is like controlling for income by asking whether the respondents own a Porsche. Also, be aware that Scientific Reports is, if not quite a predatory jour…

What about Sim City?
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