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The Association of Early Touchscreen Media Use with the Development of Visual Attention and Executive Function

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The Association of Early Touchscreen Media Use with the Development of Visual Attention and Executive Function ORBIT- OnlineRepository ofBirkbeckInstitutionalTheses Enabling Open Access to Birkbecks Research Degree output The association of early touchscreen media use with the development of visual attention and executive function http://bbktheses.da.ulcc.ac.uk/476/ Version: Full Version Citation: Vaz Portugal Da Silva, Ana Maria (2020) The association of early touch- screen media use with the development of visual attention and executive function. Doctoral thesis, Birkbeck, University of London. c 2020 The Author(s) All material available through ORBIT is protected by intellectual property law, including copyright law. Any use made of the contents should comply with the relevant law. Deposit guide Contact: email The association of early touchscreen media use with the development of visual attention and executive function Ana Maria Portugal A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck, University of London February, 2020 1 Declaration I, Ana Maria Portugal, confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Exception: A part of the data reported in this thesis (12 and 18 months visits) was collected by Dr. Celeste Cheung during her Post-Doc on the TABLET project under the supervision of Dr. Tim J. Smith. During my PhD I followed up the same group of children, administering additional tasks when the children were 3.5 years old. The pre- processing and analysis of all datasets (including the previously collected eye-tracking data) were performed by me. Specifically this involved: • Preparation and analysis of longitudinal data relating to attentional control from the TABLET Study, including writing of automatic algorithms for detection of reaction times and saccades to stimuli and validation of trials for Chapter 3 and 4; • Design and administration of a battery of Executive Function tasks suitable for children and preparation and analysis of data, including arranging and piloting EF tasks with 10 toddlers, supervising the video-coding of outcome measures and trial validity for the EF tasks, and writing of automatic algorithms for computation of average scores for the screen-based EF tasks; • Follow-up contact and experimental data collection (including the data for the attention control and EF battery presented in this thesis) for the 3.5-year visit of the TABLET project using eye-tracking, behavioural, activity and physiological, vision ophthalmic and standardised Mullen Scales of Early Learning assessments, having been trained in all of these measures. I tested 47 3.5-year-olds recruited for the study. Additionally, I helped Dr. Celeste Cheung test 18 12-month-olds and 12 18-month- olds for the study. I analysed and interpreted all data for the empirical chapters in this thesis, under the guidance of my supervisors. I designed and illustrated/prepared all the figures in this thesis, except stated otherwise in the figure caption. Signed: Wednesday, February 19th, 2020 2 Acknowledgements Dedicado às minhas avós / For my grandmothers First and most important, thank you to my supervisors. Without their wise and kind support, I could never have done it. Tim, thank you for providing me with two very valuable things: time and space. I admit that during my first years in London I felt lost and unsure about the path I had taken. Throughout these years you were always understanding and waited for me to work out my direction. At the same time, your guidance was crucial in the process, and I’m grateful for all the opportunities (abstract spaces) you provided me (e.g. the Science Museum residency, the TABLET data) that shaped my scientific approach. I’m also extremely grateful to you for bringing Rachael (and Eva too!) into my PhD board, and as a consequence, altering the course of the project. Rachael, I can clearly remember our first “real” meeting in the Henry Wellcome Building kitchen when you turned my PhD plan upside down, and shifted it in a better direction. Your constant enthusiasm (e.g. grinning while waiting for results at 11 pm), help (e.g. running models in MPlus while 1321 km apart), and constructive feedback (i.e. scrutinizing every argument) were fundamental for this PhD and for my career. You two are awesome researchers and people, and I feel incredibly lucky that I did my PhD under your guidance. I hope I make you proud! I also want to thank here all the TABLET team and collaborators. I’m grateful to Celeste, for teaching me how to test and collect data with babies and for collecting a substantial amount of data for this thesis. But more than that, Celeste was one of the first true friends I found in London, and her motivation throughout these years was very important. I hope it will last a lifetime. Also, thank you to Claire, who was an exceptional friend and team-worker, and listened, helped, and reduced my lamentations numerous times; to Hamish and Megan, for all their hard work and contribution to this PhD project; and to all the CAPA interns that accompanied me at some point – it was a pleasure to work with you all. I am also especially grateful to Alex Hendry for being an extraordinary collaborator, sharing her tasks, scripts, thesis, and knowledge, and for being an inspirational role model during these years. Finally, I would like to thank Teea Gliga for her feedback and support in revising and interpreting our findings, and to Luke Mason, for the help with eye-tracking technical details. I would also like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the support of Professors Mark Johnson and Jugnoo Rahi. My PhD project touched many research lines, but it all started with the Life Study project. I’m very grateful that they allowed me to come to 3 London in 2015, and even though my PhD followed a different route after the project was cancelled, I feel very lucky that I met and worked with Jugnoo and the vision team at ICH (particularly Dipesh and Bronwen). Your kindness and care were very motivating throughout these years. I have been privileged to have been part of the amazing research community at the CBCD, and to have crossed paths with amazing researchers and witness many events in the developmental science community. I would like to thank Leslie, Berta, and Marian, for always being there to help and providing a safe space. There are too many colleagues to name, but I would like to particularly mention those who, more than amazing colleagues, are friends, kindred souls, and inspiring models: Anna, Christina, Georgie, Laura, Jen and Jono. I’m really happy that we met and I really can’t wait to share so many more things together in years to come. Não posso deixar, nesta página, de prestar agradecimento em português. Agradecer aos meus amigos em Londres, por partilharem a casa, por dividirem as saudades, por celebrarem as vitórias que se faziam a km de distância (sim, Portugal foi campeão europeu de futebol em 2016). Agradecer imenso aos amigos que ficaram em Braga, e a quem devo tantas celebrações e partilhas – Nocas, Fu, Carol, Guidinha, Sílvia – espero um dia poder recompensar-vos. Agradecer também imenso à minha enorme família, por se manter presente e unida e me lembrar o quão bom era sempre regressar. O meu maior agradecimento é direcionado, claro, à minha família chegada. Aos meus pais, por me darem as ferramentas (coragem e confiança) para chegar até aqui; ao meu irmão e à Sanne por me darem um sobrinho lindo para me alegrar durante este processo (e criar uns sobressaltos e viagens inesperadas também); à Fernanda e ao Paulo, por partilharem com paciência e compreensão todos os momentos que vivemos estes anos. E finalmente ao Zé, acima de todos, por seguir comigo lado a lado, por sempre me lembrar o que era mais importante, e por me mostrar que eu podia escolher o meu caminho, sem ele nunca faltar. Finally, I am thankful to the families who have taken part in this research through the TABLET Project. Their time, commitment, and enthusiasm were exceptional and greatly appreciated. The work presented in this thesis was supported by a U.K. Economic and Social Research Council studentship (Award ref. 1629935), and the TABLET project was funded by a Philip Leverhulme Prize (PLP-2013-028) to Dr. Tim J. Smith. 4 Abstract Attention plays a pivotal role in information processing by filtering the potential information available based on individual goals, states, and past experiences. Early attention control is thought to underpin and support executive functions (EFs), which in turn are predictive of later behavioural outcomes. The development of attention and EF is partly subject to environmental influences, such as the use of digital media. There is a rapid increase in accessibility and usability of mobile touchscreen devices (i.e. smartphones and tablets) in the family environment, but rigorous scientific research investigating the impact on the developing mind lags behind the widespread usage. To address this, children with different levels of touchscreen use were followed longitudinally at 12 months, 18 months, and 3.5 years, and tested on attention control (bottom-up, and top-down), and EF (updating, shifting, and inhibiting). Children with high touchscreen use were faster on single (i.e. pop-out) visual search, with the amount of concurrent use associated with the speed of bottom-up attention in a linear manner. This saliency bias was repeatedly found on saccadic control tasks, where steady longitudinal high use was associated with a quickening of attention to peripheral salient onsets with a resulting detriment to top-down performance, i.e. disengagement and inhibition of attention. Finally, top-down difficulties were also seen in EF tasks in high users at 3.5 years, particularly in processes of updating and shifting between abstract mental sets.
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