Dr Evelyn Law with her two daughters.
The brain of a child grows rapidly from the time of birth until early childhood. However, the part of the brain that controls executive functioning, or the prefrontal cortex, has a more protracted development. Executive functions include the ability to sustain attention, process information and regulate emotional states, all of which are essential for learning and school performance. The advantage of this slower growth in the prefrontal cortex is that the imbuing and shaping of executive function skills can happen across the school years until higher education. However, this same area of the brain responsible for executive functioning skills is also highly vulnerable to environmental influences over an extended period of time.
This study points to excessive screen time as one of the environmental influences that may interfere with executive function development. Prior research suggests that infants have trouble processing information on a two-dimensional screen. When watching a screen, the infant is bombarded with a stream of fast-paced movements, ongoing blinking lights and scene changes, which require ample cognitive resources to make sense of and process. The brain becomes “overwhelmed” and is unable to leave adequate resources for itself to mature in cognitive skills such as executive functions.
Lead author, Dr Evelyn Law from NUS Medicine and SICS’s Translational Neuroscience Programme, said, “The study provides compelling evidence to existing studies that our children’s screen time needs to be closely monitored, particularly during early brain development.” Dr Law is also a Consultant in the Division of Development and Behavioural Paediatrics at the Khoo Teck Puat – National University Children’s Medical Institute, National University Hospital.
