Members in the Media
From: Los Angeles Times

SpongeBob impairs little kids’ thinking, study finds

Los Angeles Times:

Watching just a short bit of the wildly popular kids TV show “SpongeBob SquarePants” has been known to give many parents headaches. Psychologists have now found that a brief exposure to SpongeBob, Patrick, Squidward and the rest of the crew also appears to dampen preschoolers’ brain power.

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.

Read the whole story: Los Angeles Times

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