Recently, many national and regional news outlets carried dramatic headlines implicating “SpongeBob SquarePants” as the cause of children’s poor attention. (This piece, picked up by several news websites, is a representative example.) Most of the coverage obscured the procedure, results, and implications of the findings from a brief report published in the journal Pediatrics that looked at the relationship between television viewing and attentional control among groups of preschoolers. Is it really SpongeBob’s fault?
 

 

Two researchers at the University of Virginia studied the performance of 60 4-year-olds on a series of common early childhood assessments that measure executive function. This set of skills includes the ability to control one’s attention, stay focused on specific instructions, and wait for a reward (“delayed gratification”). Each child was randomly assigned to have one of three experiences before being assessed: watch a nine-minute segment of a “fast-paced television show” (easily identifiable as Nickelodeon’s “SpongeBob SquarePants”); watch a nine-minute segment of an “educational television show” (identified as the PBS show “Caillou”); or draw with crayons and markers for nine minutes.

 

The children were predominantly white, from middle-income to upper-middle-income families, and the three groups did not differ in average age, average parental rating of attention problems, and average time spent each week watching television (as reported by parents).
 

 

Following the nine minutes of randomly prescribed activity, children who had watched the “fast-paced” show performed much more poorly on the executive function tasks than did children in the other two groups (though the performances of the other two groups did not differ from each other). The authors concluded that the immediate effects of viewing very fast-paced programming could potentially affect how children learn, a conclusion consistent with other research showing a long-term effect of television viewing during early childhood and later attention problems and academic outcomes.
 

 

First, the researchers note that the study was not about exposure to television programming, per se, or exposure to a specific show. Instead, the researchers focused on characteristics of the “fast-paced” show—the pace of scene changes, level of activity within each scene, and the fantasy element of the content—that might have affected executive function. Second, although it was connected by media reports to other research showing long-term effects of television viewing on attention and academic outcomes, in this study, the amount of exposure did not vary. Overall, parents reported that their children watched about the same amount of television. So, this study brings into focus the nature of the programming being viewed, not the number of hours. Finally, though the point was largely dismissed by the news media, the researchers also note that while this study shows an immediate effect, the longer-term effects were not examined.

 

 

Executive functioning skills develop throughout early childhood, but around age 4 skills such as paying attention during periods of instruction or dealing with frustration during lessons or on assessments become more obvious. Would the content affect these skills in older or younger children in the same way? Does exposure to the hectic world of SpongeBob cause a hiccup in children’s executive functioning, as these results suggest, and how do they recover? Finally, is children’s experience of frantic activity on a television show similar in any way to their experiences of frantic activity in their everyday world?
 

Consider this: Is the typical 4-year-old experiencing classrooms that look more or less like Bikini Bottom? Periods of high activity are typical in preschool programs. This study suggests the need to plan transitions between such intense periods and activities that will require children’s focus.