ArticleScientific reports2021
Longitudinal touchscreen use across early development is associated with faster exogenous and reduced endogenous attention control.
Article in Scientific reports, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed.
- An eye tracking examination of fantasy television's immediate influence on children's executive functions.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Screen time is differentially related to visual selective attention and visual feature processing across middle childhood.Research square · 2026Article
- Passive and active screen time relate differently to attention in preschool children.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Review
- Short-term impacts of TV viewing on executive functions in children with reading difficulties: an eye tracking study.BMC pediatrics · 2025Article
- Toddlers Viewing Fantastical Cartoons: Evidence of an Immediate Reduction in Endogenous Control Without an Increase in Stimulus-Driven Exogenous Control.Developmental science · 2025Article
- Mobile Media Content Exposure and Toddlers' Responses to Attention Prompts and Behavioral Requests.JAMA network open · 2024Article
- Parental norms and perceptions regarding use of mobile devices by children under five years.Revista latino-americana de enfermagem · 2024Observational
- Associations between Symptom Severity of Autism Spectrum Disorder and Screen Time among Toddlers Aged 16 to 36 Months.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Article
- Not all babies are in the same boat: Exploring the effects of socioeconomic status, parental attitudes, and activities during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic on early Executive Functions.Infancy : the official journal of the International Society on Infant Studies · 2022Article
- Mobile device use among preschool-aged children in Greece.Education and information technologies · 2022Article
- Associations between touchscreen exposure and hot and cool inhibitory control in 10-month-old infants.Infant behavior & development · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Childhood screen time is associated with both attentional difficulties (for television viewing) and benefits (in action video gamers), but few studies have investigated today's pervasive touchscreen devices (e.g. smartphones and tablets), which combine salient features, interactive content, and accessibility from toddlerhood (a peak period of cognitive development). We tested exogenous and endogenous attention, following forty children who were stable high (HU) or low (LU) touchscreen users from toddlerhood to pre-school. HUs were slower to disengage attention, relative to their faster baseline orienting ability. In an infant anti-saccade task, HUs displayed more of a corrective strategy of orienting faster to distractors before anticipating the target. Results suggest that long-term high exposure to touchscreen devices is associated with faster exogenous attention and concomitant decreases in endogenous attention control. Future work is required to demonstrate causality, dissociate variants of use, and investigate how attention behaviours found in screen-based contexts translate to real-world settings.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.