The Cyber Effect (13 page)

Yes, I said it.
Evolutionary blip
.

Less eye contact could change the course of human civilization.

But so far, there aren't campaigns to alert parents to the dangers of their wandering attention span. Nobody seems to be even talking about this issue, this real risk, except those with an interest in cyberpsychology. If the lobbying group for babies (who don't really contribute to the economy, do they?) were as strong and rich and persistent as the ones for Big Pharma, real-estate agents, retirees, the technology industry, and commercial banks, someday there might be writing on the screen of all mobile phones that says:

The baby on the train to Galway was small, less than a few months old, a time in a baby's life that is referred to by some developmental scientists as the “fourth trimester.” At three months, a baby is still quite fetal. During this remarkable period, his or her brain will grow about 20 percent in three months.

Experiences in the world are what keeps a baby's brain growing—and what keeps a baby developing properly. When a baby is born, each cell of the brain has around 2,500 synapses—the connections that allow the brain to pass along signals. In the next three years, that number grows to about 15,000 per brain cell, when the brain creates 700 to 1,000 new neural connections every second.
Synapse formation for key developmental functions such as hearing, language, and cognition peak during this time, making this window in a young child's life extremely crucial for the development of higher-level functions.

This was the thinking behind the Baby Einstein products, which were first marketed in 1997 by a former teacher and stay-at-home mom, Julie Aigner-Clark. She and her husband, William Clark, invested $18,000 of their own savings to produce the first product, a video they called
Baby Einstein
, meant for infants and children under two. It showed toys and cartoons and other visuals interspersed with sounds and music, stories, numbers, and words in several languages.
Just four years later, the Baby Einstein franchise was bringing in $25 million a year, and several companies had invested to become part owners, including Disney.

The premise?

Stimulate your baby's brain and you can increase a baby's intelligence, or even create a baby genius.

Except…what about the science?

Too much stimulation is not necessarily a good thing.

Visual acuity
, as it's known in the field of child development, is acquired in the first two years of life, if a baby is raised in normal real-world conditions. This window of time is crucial in the creation of properly functioning eyesight. Similar to the way language skills should be acquired before five years of age, the same goes with depth perception and binocular vision, which is a factor in hand-eye coordination, balance, and fine motor skills. At birth an infant's visual acuity ranges from 20/200 to 20/400 (the higher the number, the worse the eyesight) and improves rapidly in the first years of life, further evidence of the incredible changes that happen in the infant brain during this period. By the time infants reach two years of age, most of them have miraculously achieved 20/20 vision.

Perceptual development is a true neurobiological wonder—and a product of nature and nurture. It doesn't happen without an environment. As soon as they are born, babies begin scanning the world around them and looking for meaningful patterns.

During the first two months of life, their eyes focus on edge detection and shapes, a process that has inspired work in the science of
computer vision
(or
image understanding
). At three months, a baby's focus shifts to
internal features
of an object, or the features within a shape. There's a part of the brain in both children and adults that is dedicated to
face processing
, or facial recognition, something that we know from brain imaging studies. Babies demonstrate an ability to prefer their mother's face from the earliest hours of life, and by two to three months old they show a preference for the internal features of her face, particularly her eyes.

This means, as much as adults are hardwired to find babies irresistible to look at—for the survival of the species—a baby will prefer to
look at its mother's face and eyes over other things. This is how development and learning begin.

Can an animated app, an avatar, or a 3-D cartoon video replace this, re-create it, or override human nature?

In 2006, nearly a decade after the initial launch of its products, a complaint was filed against the Baby Einstein company, which had become a booming multi-million-dollar-a-year global brand, for making false claims.
Eventually several studies backed up this complaint, alleging that young children who viewed the videos regularly for one month, with or without parents, showed no greater understanding of words from the program than children who had never seen it.

Even more troubling, a research team of developmental experts coordinated by the University of Washington studied infants between eight and sixteen months who were exposed to videos and DVDs such as those sold by Baby Einstein and Brainy Baby and found this exposure to be strongly associated with lower scores on a standard language development test. In other words, the
study claimed that these videos could delay speech. The interpretation of the study findings were softened later, when the founders of Baby Einstein sued the University of Washington and a second team of experts was brought in to interpret the findings—and determined that
the videos had minimal to no impact on infant development. Negative impact was declared “not sufficiently proven.” Disney, which by then owned the Baby Einstein brand, changed the wording of the product claims on its merchandise and offered a refund to anyone who had purchased the DVDs for language enhancement purposes and hadn't seen results.

Let's take the Baby Einstein debate out of the courts for a second. And let's put aside whether the University of Washington study was interpreted correctly the first time. This is the salient question: What is really known about brain development and the acquisition of language (and other cognitive skills) in infants?

The evidence is irrefutable: The best way to help a baby learn to talk or develop any other cognitive skill is through live interaction with another human being. Time and time again videos and television shows have been shown to be ineffective in learning prior to the age of two. Most significant, a study of one thousand infants found that babies
who watched more than two hours of DVDs per day performed worse on language assessments than babies who did not watch DVDs. For each hour of watching a DVD, babies knew six to eight words fewer than babies who did not watch DVDs. Still, some formats, some shows, and some ways of delivering educational information to young children have been shown to be more
effective. These seem to be quieter shows, calmer formats with only one story line—the television show
Blue's Clues
, for instance, and
Teletubbies
.

Children who are taught by their parents and caregivers, people with whom they have an emotional bond, demonstrate the most improvement. Researchers speculate that this is probably because very
young children learn through gestures and interactive communication with adults. In other words, babies learn best from humans, not machines.

So why do these “early learning” products continue to sell well? There is a never-ending parade of them, as any trip to iTunes, Amazon, or a baby store will show you. A recent and mind-boggling example of this was a 2013 Fisher-Price product called the Apptivity Seat, designed to “grow” with your child. For a newborn, it was a bouncy seat. For a toddler, it became a walker. In both cases, it was a sedentary entertainment contraption with an “overhead pivoting case” that held an iPad or tablet over the baby or toddler's face. Just $74.59 on Amazon, it came with free-to-download apps that were advertised as “developmental,” “soothing,” and “early learning.”

In the sales photograph shown on Amazon, an infant is pictured with an iPad only a baby's-arm-length from its face. (This is probably because the optimal viewing distance for a newborn is six to twelve inches.) This way, even before the baby has the motor skills to lift the device or the neck strength to turn away, the poor thing is trapped by technology. It's less of an Apptivity Seat and more of a
captivity
seat.

One special feature was advertised: “Locks your iPad device securely inside case to protect from dribbles and drool.” That's very thoughtful. The iPad stays clean, but in the meantime, who is bothering to protect Baby?

Quickly dubbed the “worst toy of the year” by consumer groups, the Apptivity Seat was soon discontinued by its manufacturer. The
apps, however, are still available online—and can be used with the Apptivity Gym, which positions a device above your baby's head while he or she lies on a mat.

Here's what troubles me.
Let's start with the fact that a mobile phone or any wireless device is considered by many public health experts to be a risk and possible carcinogen for newborns, due to the unknown effects of radiation exposure on their fragile, developing systems. We also don't know how looking at the screen of a tablet might impact an infant's eyesight development. A very interesting series of studies from 1958 (that led to a Nobel Prize) was carried out on
kittens, revealing that visual experiences at birth, when the brain has a high degree of plasticity, have permanent and irreversible effects. These studies are really important in terms of the impact of visual stimuli such as exposure to digital screens, as they demonstrate that sensory input is central to visual development in newborns.

Next, there's this concern: If a baby spends too much time simply being cyber-stimulated and not connecting in the real world—with real people, real pets, real toys, and real objects—it could impair other important pre-academic skills such as empathy, social abilities, and problem-solving. These are things primarily learned by exploring the natural environment and using the imagination to spend time in unstructured, creative play.

Simply moving in the world—movement for movement's sake—is not just good for the heart, lungs, circulatory system, and everything else in a human being's body; for a child it is essential to participate in sensorimotor activities. Moving in the world is what eventually leads to knowing how to pick up a block, climb a tree, run downhill, and build a sand castle. These visual-motor skills have also been shown to be important to later success in math and science.

The Apptivity Seat was described as promoting “discovering” and “learning” (not to mention being “soothing”). If you're like me, you may wonder who is regulating the educational value of videos, DVDs, and tablet and phone apps for infants. How can these companies make such positive claims when, in fact, it is possible that overexposure to these products may do more actual harm than good?

The answer is disturbing on many levels. It seems that as long as no
hard science exists to
disprove
their claims, companies feel free to say almost anything they can get away with. It saddens me to suspect that profit and pure greed is the driving force, not the welfare of children, because until conclusive studies can be done, we are in the dark. And until then, there is really no way to scientifically evaluate these new tech devices and products, or even know if the delivery vehicle for them, the touchscreen and its computer-generated depth perspectives, isn't having a harmful effect on visual perception and eyesight. Only studies done over time will reveal the overall impact. By that time, a critical developmental phase for an entire generation of young children may be over.

But let's start with some things that are proven, and have been confirmed by short-term studies:

Now I'll deliver the final blow. Prepare yourself. More than fifteen years ago, in 1999, the esteemed body of the American Academy of Pediatrics
recommended against screen use, including television, for children under two.

I'm curious. Had you heard about that? At first, the AAP offered this as a “suggestion” because what was known about media consumption among infants then was inconclusive. But in the ensuing fifteen years, as more studies have been done, the recommendation is now based on findings. In 2011, the AAP issued a science-driven policy statement discouraging media use by children under two.

That's right. You read that correctly. Or did you miss it?

No TV for babies. No apps with funny cartoons on a parent's or babysitter's mobile phone. The AAP believes these things could potentially have a negative influence on a child's development. But even so, there's been an explosion in electronic media marketed directly at infants aged one to eighteen months, a multimillion-dollar industry selling computer games for very young children—some as young as nine months—and a launching of entire television networks that specifically target children as young as twelve months. And who could forget the Apptivity Seat, labeled as suitable for newborns?

So why isn't this important AAP cautionary information provided on the marketing materials and packages of baby apps and tablet software targeted at them? I wish I had an answer for you.