Abstract
The impact of the digital world on the developing mind is often debated but rarely evidenced. While TV viewing has previously been associated with attentional impairments, video gaming has been linked to enhanced visual attention. Touchscreen devices offer young children the potential for both watching videos and interactive use (i.e., playing games or educational apps) and the current study aims to test whether touchscreen use is associated with attention control differences during the pre-school years. In the current study, part of the Toddler Attentional Behaviours and LEarning with Touchscreens (TABLET) lab sample, we investigated longitudinally whether touchscreen use by toddlers at 12 months, 18 months and 3.5 years of age is associated with differences in a screen-based task of attention control – the Gap-Overlap Task (Johnson, Posner & Rothbart, 1991). Fifty-three infants were recruited based on their reported daily touchscreen use (High Users, >=10 minutes/day and Low Users, < 10 minutes/day minutes). Saccadic Reaction Times on baseline, gap, and overlap conditions were extracted offline using a set of trial gaze validation steps, and disengagement and facilitation were calculated by subtracting the baseline SRT to the overlap SRT and to the gap SRT, respectively. Generalised estimating equations showed a main effect of touchscreen usage group on disengagement (high users slower to disengage from stimuli, p< 0.05), which was followed up to reveal a group difference on the baseline condition (high users faster to orient to the peripheral target, p< 0.05. These effects suggest that early exposure to touchscreen devices may be associated with a quickening of attention to peripheral onsets with no concurrent detriment under conflict conditions. Future work should investigate whether performance in screen-based measures translates to real-world settings