Pre-adolescents who use increasing amounts of social media perform worse on reading, vocabulary, and memory tests in early adolescence compared to those who use none or little social media.
That’s according to a new study that suggests a link between social media use and worse cognition in adolescents. The results are published in JAMA.
“This is a really exciting study,” says psychologist Mitch Prinstein of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who was not involved in the new research.
“It confirms much of what we’ve been hearing from schools across the country, which is that kids are having a huge difficulty concentrating and learning as well as before, because of the ways social media have 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’s crucial to understand how social media use during school hours specifically affects learning, especially now that so many schools are considering cell phone bans,” says the study’s author and pediatrician Jason Nagata of 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 on adolescents, called the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study. Scientists have been tracking thousands of pre-adolescents as they go through adolescence to understand the development of their brains.
The ongoing study has surveyed the children about their social media use every year and administered a series of learning and memory tests every two years. Nagata and his colleagues used data from more than 6,000 children, ages 9 to 10, as the scientists followed them into early adolescence.
They classified the children into three groups based on their evolving patterns of social media use. The largest group, consisting of about 58% of the children, used little or no social media in the following years. The second largest group, about 37% of the children, started with low levels of social media use but, by age 13, spent about an hour a day on social media.
The remaining 6% of the children—called the “high increasing social media use” group—spent about three or more hours a day by age 13.
“The Dose Effect”
All groups took a series of tests to measure their cognitive functioning at the start of the study and in early adolescence. For example, the oral reading recognition test examined their reading and vocabulary skills. Another test, called the picture vocabulary test, asked them to match the right pictures with words they heard.
“What was remarkable to me and perhaps surprising was that even the low increasers in social media use, those who had about an hour a day by age 13, on average scored 1 to 2 points lower on reading and memory tests compared to non-users of social media,” says Nagata.
And the high increaser group scored up to 4 to 5 points lower than non-users of social media.
“So, those with the highest social media use have lower scores,” Nagata observes, “but even the low users had smaller differences in their cognitive scores.”
“This really speaks to the dose effect of these [apps],” says psychologist Sheri Madigan of the University of Calgary, who wrote an accompanying editorial for the study. “It’s problematic at very high uses, but it’s also problematic even in small doses.”
While a difference of a few points on test scores may seem insignificant, “it’s important to understand that children are a moving target,” explains Prinstein, who is also chief of strategy and integration of psychology at the American Psychological Association.
“Even a small change in how they appear after a short period of time means they are now on a different trajectory from the others. That means that in two, three, five years, we could be talking about very significant gaps between children who may have been intense users or not so intense.”
And other recent research shows that hours on social media increase later in adolescence, Nagata notes. “We expect that by the time they reach 15, 16, 17 years old, the use will be much higher,” which could lead to even larger gaps in cognition and learning in the following years, he adds.
In previous studies, Nagata’s team used the same ABCD Study data and found other concerning trends among underage social media users.
They discovered that most children—nearly two-thirds—start using social media before age 13, with the average user having three social media accounts.
They also found high levels of smartphone addiction-like symptoms among 10- to 14-year-olds.
“Half of the children who had smartphones said they lost track of the time they spent using the phone,” Nagata says. “A quarter who use social media say they use social media to forget about problems. And 11% say social media use has negatively affected their school performance.”
A Critical Period for Brain Development
Adolescence is a critical period for brain development, Prinstein notes, when the brain fine-tunes its architecture based on experiences.
“After the first year of life, adolescence is the time when we see the greatest growth and the greatest reorganization of the brain in our lives,” he says.
In a recent study, Prinstein and his colleagues found that adolescents who are heavy social media users have brains more tuned to a social media existence, with its “rapid and constant feedback,” Prinstein says. “What we’re finding is that kids become hypersensitive to the kinds of likes, comments, feedback, and rewards they can get from peers.”
These findings help explain the results of the new study, he adds. “It makes perfect sense that if their brains are growing to be optimized for social media activities, they may not be optimized for other things they need to do, as we saw in the [new] study.”
The new study also “gives us sufficient evidence that we really need to create specific policies around age limits, for example, on social media apps,” Madigan says.
Denmark announced last week that it plans to impose a social media ban for users under 15, she notes. Australia is requiring social media companies to “take reasonable steps to prevent Australians under 16 from creating or maintaining an account” starting in December 2025.
Madigan hopes other countries take note. “I think we’ll see a cascade effect. This is going to be really beneficial for kids.”
Source: npr.org by Rhitu Chatterjee