1. Effects of Internet Use, Gaming, or
Texting on Your Child’s Cognitive
Processes
Presented in Support of Media Use
by
Christina Friis -- MSPP
2. Steven Johnson: Everything Bad is
Good For You
• “for decades, we’ve worked under the
assumption that mass culture follows a
steadily declining path toward lowest-
common-denominator standards, presumably
because the ‘masses’ want dumb, simple
pleasures and big media companies want to
give the masses what they want. But in fact,
the exact opposite is happening: the culture is
getting more intellectually demanding, not
less” (2006, p. 9).
3. But my kids would rather play video
games than read books!
• Andrew Solomon, NY Times: those who read
are “many times more likely… to visit
museums… attend musical performances…
perform volunteer and charity work…” while
“non-readers – more than half the population
– have settled into apathy” (The Closing of the
American Book, 2004).
4. Cognitive processes don’t stop once
the controller is put down
• “the clearest measure of the cognitive
challenges posted by modern games is the
sheer size of the cottage industry devoted to
publishing game guides, sometimes called
walk-throughs, that give you detailed, step-by-
step explanations of how to complete the
game” (Johnson, Everything Bad is Good For
You, 2006, p. 28).
5. Of course, the industrial tax
http://sphotos-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash3/p480x480/644281_10151554572819866_77938503_n.jpg
6. Hold on, I’ll Google it
• “The results of four studies suggest that when
faced with difficult questions, people are primed
to think about computers and that when people
expect to have future access to information, they
have lower rates of recall of the information itself
and enhanced recall instead for where to access
it” (Sparrow, et al, 2011, p. 1).
• From Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive
Consequences of Having Information at Our
Fingertips.
7. I just can’t quit you, Google.
• “It may be no more than nostalgia, at this point,
to wish we were less dependent on our gadgets.
The experience of losing our internet connection
becomes more and more like losing a friend. We
must remain plugged in to know what Google
knows” (Sparrow, et al, 2011, p. 4).
• From Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive
Consequences of Having Information at Our
Fingertips.
8. Attention and Multi-tasking and Eating
and Drinking and Talking and Walking
• “Attention is… the taking into possession of
the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of
what seem several simultaneously possible
objects or trains of thought.
Focalisation, concentration, of consciousness
are of its essence”
– William James (Eysenck, 2010, p. 153).
9. Divided is our attention, united is our mind
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_XBLJ3QFIXjE/TJzykKao0RI/AAAAAAAAA-8/1AvqkrBYk-8/s1600/pat+your+head.jpg
10. Draw me a map
• Visuo-spatial sketchpad: “a component of
working memory (short-term memory store
including attention, speech-based
information, visual information, and
temporary storage) that is involved in visual
and spatial processing of information”
(Eysenck, 2010, p. 211-212).
11.
12. References
• Eysenck, M., & Keane, M. (2010). Cognitive
Psychology: A Student’s Handbook, 6th
Edition. N.Y.: Psychology Press.
• Johnson, S. (2006). Everything bad is good for
you. New York, NY: Riverhead Books.
• Soloman, A. (2004). The closing of the American
Book. The New York Times.
• Sparrow, Betsy (2011) Google effects on
memory: Cognitive consequences of having
information at our fingertips. Science, 333,
1-6.
Hinweis der Redaktion
With the constant introduction of new media, we are at the mercy of current society and run the risk of being barraged into a corner with updates for the newest computer or software trend. However, thanks to all of this media, we have never been smarter. This is not something we are being taught in school or in conferences; the lessons are right at our fingertips on our iphones and ipads, and on our televisions. Although the widespread belief is that popular culture is all about escapism and non-thinking, everything from video games to film and television shows have gotten increasingly complex.The internet has also facilitated a completely dialed-in society. With blogging, social networking, chatting, emailing, and information sharing, those on the web are applying focus and intent. According to Steven Johnson, author of the book Everything Bad is Good for You, there is a process at work with media, by way of video games that require decision-making and growing complexity in the narrative and structure of television and film that create an environment likely to enhance problem-solving skills.
Besides the typical arguments regarding content and inactivity due to sitting in front of a television, there is another way to look at media today: as a cognitive workout. By looking at these forms of entertainment as stimulation for the brain, the impact is positive. The argument that children should be reading books instead of playing video games is a bit of a misdirected topic. Marshall McLuhan observed that it’s very difficult to have an unbiased view on things like video games when we already have the knowledge fresh in our minds that reading is such an intellectual enhancement. If you look at today’s increasingly complex popular culture and media, you would see the same skills being used by readers – attention, memory, following threads and plots – and yet different skills being developed, such as decision-making, probing, and telescoping. Probing being learning information about the given environment and telescoping being organizing and strategizing necessary goals to be achieved in hopes of completing a much bigger goal.
Not all gaming is superficial fun. If a gamer comes to an impasse in a game, there might be a time to put the controller down and walk away to do something else. Interestingly, though, the hurdle is still under scrutiny in the gamer’s mind. Even when someone moves back into the real world, the mental problem is still being wrestled with. And these issues don’t always provide instant gratification – it may take hours or days to reach the final goal. Hence, the walk-throughs.
Johnson tells the story of a time when he was showing his seven year old nephew the computer game SimCity – it’s a very complex game in which you can run your own city by way of building houses, office buildings, laying roads and sewer pipe, everything that goes into an actual city. Anyway, after about an hour of showing his nephew his city and trying to revive a particularly run-down manufacturing district, the seven year old chimes in with “I think we need to lower our industrial tax rates.” How does a seven year old even know what that means or why it should be done? After an hour of watching some game play, he already knew that this would make a difference. If industrial tax rates were being taught in class, it would be likely that all the children would be asleep after two seconds. And I’d bet that most adults would be, too.
Now, there have been studies on the Internet’s in particular, Google’s, effects on a person’s memory. The results showed that when we are faced with a gap in our knowledge, we are primed to turn to the computer to rectify the situation. When we don’t know the answer to a general knowledge question, we feel the need to search for the answer – and we find that search with Google. Also, when people don’t believe they will need the information later, for example, in an exam, they do not recall it at the same rate as when they believe they will need it. If we know we can look up something later, we are less likely to make an effort to remember it. Since we are usually always able to Google something, it might leave us in a constant state of not feeling like we need to encode what we learn.
That being said, the studies also showed that although we might not remember something, we do remember where to find it. The preliminary evidence could argue that we have adapted our memories – using the computer and Google as external memory sources that can be accessed any time. We remember what we think we need to remember and we don’t remember what we don’t find necessary to remember. Relying on our computers to find information uses several of the same transactive memory processes that are used in social sharing. We know who knows what in our families and offices, so that when we need to know something or can’t remember something, we know who to ask. Just like with Google. We have become dependent on Google the same way we have become dependent on our friend remembering something we don’t.
Many comments are made about multitasking and intake. With attention spread so thinly over so many different things – texting, watching tv, doing homework, scanning your Facebook newsfeed – not one of those activities will get the attention it deserves. Focused attention is when we try to attend to only one source of information while ignoring other stimuli. We are susceptible to distraction when the task at hand involves lower perceptional load – our brains would not be working at full capacity, therefore we would be able to spare processing capacity on another stimulus. However, it should be considered quite a talent to balance so many forms of information at once. Our senses are adapting, just like our minds are being trained to handle the influx of media. Television shows have been doing this slowly over time – increasing its demands on our attention and ability to keep up with storylines.
How successful we are at multi-tasking obviously depends very much on the two tasks in question. Most of us can easily walk and have a conversation at the same time, but find it surprisingly difficult to rub our stomach with one hand while patting our head with the other. There has been a huge amount of research using the dual-task approach to assess our ability to perform two tasks at the same time. Three things were looked at: task similarity, practice, and task difficulty. Treisman and Davies found that two monitoring tasks interfered with each other when the stimuli on both tasks were in the same sense modality – visual or auditory. Spelke, Hirst, and Neisser found that practicing doing two things at once actually improves performance. And Sullivan found that the ability to perform two tasks together is definitely dependent on their difficulty.
Excuse me while I get a bit more technical for a minute. The visuo-spatial sketchpad is used for the temporary storage and manipulation of visual patterns and spatial movement. We use this every day in many different situations – finding a route when walking, or playing a video game. Logie and others studied performance on a complex computer game. It was called Space Fortress and it involved maneuvering a space ship around the screen. At first, when participants playing the game were asked to perform a secondary visuo-spatial task, performance was severely impaired. Then, after 25 hours of practice, the hindrance on performance was greatly reduced. In other words, the visuo-spatial sketchpad was used during training, but then less so after practice. In better words, functioning decreased, but performance increased.
Kids are learning more than ever would have been possible; and not just being able to learn new information, but also the inner-workings of the Internet. Anyone who has had to install software is learning very complex and intricate things in a relatively short time. With or without consulting a manual, it’s an entirely different language. We shouldn’t be upset at the fact that our kids can program the VCR and set up a new computer straight out of the box. The internet provides us with educational materials as well as being an educational material itself. You’re exercising cognitive muscles interacting with the form of the media – learning the tricks of an email client or configuring the video chat software. Our minds are meant to process information – to put it into action, to solve problems, to analyze, to interact and so on. The internet, video games, and texting are providing this cognitive workout to our kids in a ways that we never had.
