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[!summary]Researchers scanned 4-year-olds while they heard stories as audio-only, with pictures, or as animations.
Seeing pictures with the audio produced the best brain connectivity for language, imagery and reflection.
Audio-only left kids straining and animation overstimulated them, so too much animation may hurt development of mental imagery and story understanding.
Highlights
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For the study, 27 children around age 4 went into an FMRI machine. They were presented with stories in three conditions: audio only; the illustrated pages of a storybook with an audio voiceover; and an animated cartoon.
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While the children paid attention to the stories, the MRI, the machine scanned for activation within certain brain networks, and connectivity between the networks.
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When children could see illustrations, language-network activity dropped a bit compared to the audio condition. Instead of only paying attention to the words, Hutton says, the children’s understanding of the story was “scaffolded” by having the images as clues.
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Most importantly, in the illustrated book condition, researchers saw increased connectivity between — and among — all the networks they were looking at: visual perception, imagery, default mode and language.
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When we read to our children, they are doing more work than meets the eye. “It’s that muscle they’re developing bringing the images to life in their minds.” Hutton’s concern is that in the longer term, “kids who are exposed to too much animation are going to be at risk for developing not enough integration.”
El efecto de las pantallas en términos de la infraejercitación de las capacidades imaginativas y comprensivas.
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One interesting note is that, because of the constraints of an MRI machine, which encloses and immobilizes your body, the story-with-illustrations condition wasn’t actually as good as reading on Mom or Dad’s lap. The emotional bonding and physical closeness, Hutton says, were missing. So were the exchanges known as “dialogic reading,” where caregivers point out specific words or prompt children to “show me the cat?” in a picture. “That’s a whole other layer,” of building reading Hutton says.
Limitaciones del estudio que indican la posibilidad de un mayor efecto real.