Watching it may give adults a headache, but watching SpongeBob actually impairs children’s thinking — or, more specifically, their executive function:
Angeline Lillard and Jennifer Peterson, both of the University of Virginia’s department of psychology, wanted to see whether watching fast-paced television had an immediate influence on kids’ executive function — skills including attention, working memory, problem solving and delay of gratification that are associated with success in school.
Television’s negative effect on executive function over the long term has been established, the researchers wrote Monday in the journal Pediatrics, but less is known about its immediate effects.
To test what those might be, Lillard and Peterson randomly assigned 60 4-year-olds to three groups: one that watched nine minutes of a fast-paced, “very popular fantastical cartoon about an animated sponge that lives under the sea;” one that watched nine minutes of slower-paced programming from a PBS show “about a typical U.S. preschool-aged boy;” and a third group that was asked to draw for nine minutes with markers and crayons.
Immediately after their viewing and drawing tasks were complete, the kids were asked to perform four tests to assess executive function. Unfortunately for the denizens of Bikini Bottom, the kids who watched nine minutes of the frenetic high jinks of the “animated sponge” scored significantly worse than the other kids.