Negative Impact of Daily Screen Use on Inhibitory Control Network in Preadolescence: A Two Year Follow-Up Study

The COVID pandemic has made an unprecedented shift in children’s daily lives. Children are increasingly spending time with screens to learn and connect with others. As online environment rapidly substitutes in-person experience, understanding children’s neuropsychological trajectories associated with screen experiences is important. Given previous findings suggesting that excessive screen use can lead children to seek more immediate rewards over delayed outcomes, we hypothesized that the increased screen time delays the development of inhibitory control. By analyzing neuropsychological data for 8,334 children (9-11ys) from the ABCD Study Data, we found that children with longer screen time showed a higher reward orientation and a weaker inhibitory control system (i.e., fronto-striatal circuitry) in the brain. Importantly, the interaction of screen experience with the reward sensitivity negatively influences the development of inhibitory control system in the brain over two years, implying possible long-term negative impacts of increased daily screen time on neuropsychological development in children. The results further demonstrated that screen time especially influences the dorsal striatum connectivity, which suggests that the effect of daily screen use is more of a habitual seeking behavior. The results together provide neural and behavioral evidence on the negative impact of daily screen use on developing children.