It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Monday, May 23, 2022
Excessive sports training may have negative effects on mood state
A research conducted by the UAB with road cyclists, published in the journal PeerJ, sheds light on the importance of monitoring a training session load with the use of heart rate variability measuring tools, to favour assimilation and prevent injuries, and to compare training intensity with mood states the following morning.
To build fitness, athletes must apply stress to the body, and then through recovery, the body adapts and is able to accomodate greater stress in the next round of training. Controlling the adequate amounts of stress and recovery is essential to ameliorate the performance of athletes, as well as to prevent injuries and problems associated with overtraining.
Researchers from the Laboratory of Sport Psychology and the Sport Research Institute at the UAB have studied the effects training intensity has on road cyclists in terms of mood states and their capacity to adapt to greater training loads, assessed using heart rate variability (HRV).
The research, published in the journal PeerJ, was conducted through a six-week analysis of the answers five amateur road cyclists gave of the physical stress they endured during training. Once completed, the cyclists also responded questionnaires on how they had perceived the physical exertion of their training. The following morning they measured their HRV and recorded their mood state.
The researchers argue that a change in mood and/or HRV – measured using the HFnu (normalised high frequency band) parameter – in athletes the day after training could serve as indicator of training intensity, signalling whether the training had been adequate or too intense for the physical state of the athlete. The study observed that the more intense the training, the lower the mood on the following day, and also the lower the HRV. In contrast, high HFnu was associated with an improvement in the mood of atletes, which indicated that there is a relationship between HRV and mood states.
“The objective of the research was to explore the relation among three aspects: training, heart rate variability and mood”, explains researcher of the UAB Department of Basic Psychology Carla Alfonso. “With this study we aimed to know when an athlete must rest, because their system is saturated, and when an athlete can train, with more or less intensity, because their body is ready to assimilate the training load”.
The results obtained are a first step in “setting up a monitoring system which takes into account both internal and external training loads, in addition to mood state and heart rate variability of the athlete, with the aim of helping them adapt to their training and prevent injuries that may come with overtraining”, concludes Professor Lluís Capdevila of the UAB Department of Basic, Developmental and Educational Psychology, and co-author of the study.
IMAGE: ARJUN BHARIOKE (LEFT) AND MARTIN MUNZ (RIGHT) DISCUSSING ANALYSIS OF CORTICAL RECORDINGS.view more
CREDIT: IOB
The cerebral cortex is thought to be the seat of conscious processing in the brain. Rather than being inactivated, specific cells in the cortex show higher spontaneous activity during general anesthesia than when awake, and this activity is synchronized across those cortical cells. Improving our understanding of the neuronal mechanisms of general anesthesia could lead to better anesthetic drugs and improved surgical outcomes.
In a paper recently published in Neuron, researchers from the group of Professor Botond Roska at the University of Basel and the Institute of Molecular and Clinical Ophthalmology (IOB) reveal how different cell types in cortex change their activity during general anesthesia, helping to understand how unconsciousness may be induced.
You are lying on the operating table. The doctor tells you to count to 5, and places an anesthetic mask on your face. By the count of 4, you’ve lost consciousness. You will not wake up until after the surgery. What happened in your brain during this time?
One would probably assume that your brain has been silent. Especially your cortex, the brain area thought to be the seat of conscious processing. However, for close to 100 years, it has been known that some cells in the cortex are active and that cortex alternates between periods of high and low activity during general anesthesia.
Using EEG electrodes attached to the scalp is one of the few tools available to measure this activity, but electrodes don’t allow one to identify the cells underlying this activity. Therefore, the question has remained: which cells contribute to the rhythmic activity in the cortex, and how might that contribute to the loss of consciousness during general anesthesia.
On the trail of unconsciousness
Cortex is composed of different cell types, each with different functions. Different general anesthetics act on different receptors, located on different types of neurons, distributed throughout the brain. Yet, all general anesthetics lead to the loss of consciousness, and so “we were interested in finding if there is a common neuronal mechanism across different anesthetics”, says Dr. Martin Munz, one of the three first authors of the study.
In this Neuron publication, the researchers used modern genetic tools, in combination with mouse lines labeling individual cortical cell types to address this question. They found that in contrast to what had previously been suspected, only one specific cell type within cortex, layer 5 pyramidal neurons, showed an increase in activity when the animal was exposed to different anesthetics.
“Each anesthetic induces a rhythm of activity in layer 5 pyramidal neurons. Interestingly, these rhythms differed between anesthetics. Some were slower, and some were faster. However, what was common across all anesthetics was that they all induced an alignment of activity. That is, when they were active, all layer 5 pyramidal neurons were active at the same time”, says Dr. Arjun Bharioke from the same research group and also a first author of the study. “We called this ‘neuronal synchrony’”.
Layer 5 pyramidal neurons serve as a major output center for the cerebral cortex and also connect different cortical areas to each other. Thus, they communicate both between different cortical areas, as well as from the cortex to other areas of the brain. Therefore, a synchronization of activity across layer 5 pyramidal neurons restricts the information that the cortex can output.
Like a crowd at a soccer match
“It seems that instead of each neuron sending different pieces of information, during anesthesia all layer 5 pyramidal neurons send the same piece of information”, says Arjun Bharioke, “One could think of this as when people in a crowd transition from talking to each other, for example before a soccer or basketball game, to when they are cheering for their team, during the game. Before the game starts, there are many independent conversations. In contrast, during the game, all the spectators are cheering on their team. Thus, there is only one piece of information being transmitted across the crowd”.
Prior work has proposed that loss of consciousness occurs through the disconnection of cortex from the rest of the brain. The results of the IOB team suggest a mechanism by which this may occur – by the transition to lowered information output from cortex, during anesthesia.
Alexandra Brignall, the third first author and a veterinarian by trade says: “Anesthetics are very powerful, as anyone who has been in a surgery can attest to. But they are also not always easy to use. During a surgery, one has to continuously monitor the depth of the anesthetic to ensure that the patient is not too deep or too shallow. The more we know how anesthetics work and what they do in the brain, the better. Maybe this will help researchers develop new drugs to more specifically target the cells in the brain associated with unconsciousness.”
“Our findings are highly relevant for medicine, since anesthesia is one of the most frequently performed medical procedures. Understanding the neuronal mechanism of anesthesia could lead to better anesthetic drugs and improved surgical outcomes”, says Botond Roska, corresponding author and director of the IOB Molecular Research Center.
IMAGE: THREE GRASSHOPPER SPECIES WHOSE FEEDING BEHAVIOUR WAS STUDIED (FROM LEFT): THE GRAVEL GRASSHOPPER, THE GREEN MOUNTAIN GRASSHOPPER FEEDING ON A SPECIES OF BEDSTRAW, AND THE WART-BITER, WHICH ALSO OCCURS IN LOWER FRANCONIA. (PHOTOS:view more
CREDIT: SEBASTIAN KOENIG / UNIVERSITY OF WUERZBURG
Anyone walking past a meadow on a mild summer evening is often exposed to an impressive concert. It is the grasshoppers, bush crickets and crickets that create a Mediterranean atmosphere with their chirping. The songs are usually those of males trying to attract females to mate with them. But they can also be rival songs when two males get too close to each other.
In total, there are more than 80 species of Orthoptera in Germany. "Grasshoppers are very important for many open grassland ecosystems", states zoologist Sebastian König from the Biocenter of the Julius-Maximilians-Universität (JMU) Würzburg in Bavaria, Germany: "The insects are an important food source for birds. And as herbivores, they remove up to 30 percent of the plant biomass in a meadow, thus promoting the co-occurrence of many plant species."
Climate change: How do food webs respond?
Grasshoppers and their feeding habits are a scientifically exciting topic. Generally, there is still a need for research on the feeding interactions that link plants and herbivorous insects.
Why are scientists interested in this? "It is important to understand how food webs function in order to be able to predict their stability in the context of climate change", explains König, who is a doctoral researcher at the JMU Chair of Animal Ecology and Tropical Biology headed by Professor Ingolf Steffan-Dewenter and co-supervised by Professor Jochen Krauß.
More than 3,000 grasshoppers observed
König and colleagues from Würzburg, Munich and Salzburg have published a first contribution to the understanding of Orthoptera-plant interactions in the journal Global Change Biology.
For the study, Orthoptera-plant communities were investigated in different regions - at warm sites near Karlstadt and Winterhausen in Lower Franconia as well as in the Berchtesgaden Alps, hence allowing the analysis of species communities along a climatic gradient, at altitudes ranging from 250 to 2,100 metres.
During the summers of 2019, 2020 and 2021, the team determined which grasshopper species fed on which plants on 41 grassland sites. They observed more than 3,000 individuals of 54 species and collected the faecal pellets of the animals to analyse the plant remains they contained using DNA sequencing.
Theory on food niche partially confirmed
The ecologists wanted to test the hypothesis put forward a few years ago that it should be advantageous for insects at higher altitudes to feed on a broader range of plant species. This would make sense, because in high alpine environments the choice of food plants is limited. Therefore, and because of environmental variability, it is advisable not to be too choosy there.
König's study partially confirms the hypothesis. It shows that grasshoppers eat a relatively wide range of plants in cold regions. However, this also applies to warm habitats, such as the calcareous grasslands of Lower Franconia. In temperate habitats, on the other hand, where the number of plant species is large, grasshoppers are more specialized, thus feeding on plants that are closely related. But resource composition also plays an important role for the herbivores. For example, grasshoppers with a preference for grasses dominate in meadows with a high proportion of grasses.
The researchers' conclusion: "Our results suggest that climate and plant community composition influence the dietary specialisation of herbivores. If herbivores devour many different species, this could be an adaptation and a prerequisite for being able to survive in climatically extreme habitats."
Now the microbiome of the grasshoppers is being analysed
The JMU scientists now want to gather even more facts about the food niche breadth of herbivorous insects. Next, they will analyse the microorganisms that live in the gut of the grasshoppers. In this way, possible relationships between the diet and the diversity and composition of the microorganisms will be uncovered.
Phylogenetic relatedness of food plants reveals highest insect herbivore specialization at intermediate temperatures along a broad climatic gradient.
Prepare for the next supply chain disruption
CSH scientists produce the first complete image of an entire economy. Their research indicates what’s at stake if supply chains break down – and what might be done to help
IMAGE: FIRMS ARE COLORED ACCORDING TO THEIR SYSTEMIC RISK FOR THE ENTIRE ECONOMY.view more
CREDIT: CSHVIENNA
[Vienna, May 12, 2022] Researchers at the Complexity Science Hub Vienna (CSH) created a complete representation of Hungary’s economy. They mapped the entire country’s production network, including literally all of the relevant firms and all of the supply relationships with their clients and customers. With such detailed knowledge of the economy, they can compute its systemic risks.
“By viewing the economy as a network of all companies and their mutual relationships, we can now rethink economics. In particular, one can compute the risks associated with supply chain disruptions, which can be significant,” says Stefan Thurner, CSH president and co-author of the study that just appeared in Scientific Reports. “This allows us to quantify the economic systemic risk of each company within a country.”
Using a unique dataset of value-added tax (VAT) information – a general tax that, in principle, is applied to all goods and services –, the team was able to reconstruct the production processes and the supply relationships between companies to an unprecedented extent and determine how each enterprise was affected by supply chain disruptions.
“This is the first time the supply chain vulnerability of a country has been calculated at such a detailed, granular level,” states the first author of the paper, Christian Diem.
“Our approach demonstrates that the real economy cannot be seen as a collection of separate supply chains. It’s a tightly connected network that has a strongly connected component, forming the center of the network, and that contains 26 percent of all companies,” adds Diem. “Our findings indicate that only a few firms pose a substantial risk to the overall economy.”
Novel approach
The researchers propose a new methodology for calculating the economic systemic risk of companies. The method not only considers all buyer-supplier relationships between businesses, but also other factors, such as the production process of each enterprise, the supply transaction’s importance, and the firm’s value in the overall production of the economy.
The scientists reconstructed the intricate production network of Hungary based on VAT data from more than 91.000 companies provided by the Hungarian Central Bank. Their most surprising finding was the vulnerability of the Magyar economy. It could be shaken by just a handful of enterprises connected by a network of highly critical supply chain relations.
According to the study, the 32 top high-risk companies, which represent 0.035 percent of the analyzed Hungarian enterprises, display an extremely high systemic risk of about 23 percent. “This means that, in the short term, about 23 percent of the national production could be adversely affected if firms cannot adjust their supply relations by finding new suppliers and customers fast enough,” Diem explains.
In addition, almost 75 percent of the national systemic risk is concentrated on only 100 high-risk companies. “Large scale snowball or domino effects are likely caused by one of these 100 firms, while the other 99% enterprises are of marginal systemic relevance.”
Policy Implications
The researchers point out that the results have a number of policy implications.
“Using our model, government institutions could identify and monitor the weak spots of the economy – those critical companies that, in case of default, could cause system-wide damage. Once those weaknesses are known, one can consider what can and should be done to fix them and make the system more resilient. We cannot see the dangers of systemic risk without knowing the weaknesses,” explains Thurner.
“Historically, economists argued in favor of regulating the financial system more strongly than the real economy because the systemic risk in the financial system was deemed to be much higher than in the rest of the economy. However, the recent supply chain crises and our results show that systemic risk is substantial in the real economy,” adds Diem.
In addition, the paper suggests introducing larger inventory buffers for risky companies and making firms aware of their economic systemic risk in the system. “Companies might become more sustainable if they know which supply lines are reliable,” Thurner argues. With the new methodology, government institutions could take a more proactive and transparent approach to ensure that supply chains are resilient.
The pandemic effect
Business operations in countries around the world have been fundamentally altered by the Covid-19 pandemic. The pandemic has negatively impacted supply chains in the past two years, resulting in shortages in a variety of sectors, including food production, vaccine supply, computer chip manufacturing, and automobile production, according to the paper.
As countries try to move back towards some level of normalization, governments may use VAT data to identify the most vulnerable – and resilient – companies when it comes to supply chains. “It’s impossible for decision-makers to manage economic systemic risks proactively without understanding which companies pose an exceptionally high risk to the entire economy in case of their temporary failure,” the scientists point out.
In the context of current discussions about gas rationing in some EU countries as a consequence of the war in Ukraine, Diem notes that some of the 32 top high-risk companies in the study are in the chemical sector. “These firms, which rely heavily on natural gas for their production, should be – at any cost – protected from gas supply shortages since they will have potentially huge snowball effect on the entire economy.”
About the CSH
The mission of Complexity Science Hub Vienna is to host, educate, and inspire complex systems scientists dedicated to making sense of Big Data to boost science and society. Scientists at the Hub develop methods for the scientific, quantitative, and predictive understanding of complex systems.
The CSH is a joint initiative of AIT Austrian Institute of Technology, Central European University CEU, Danube University Krems, Graz University of Technology, Medical University of Vienna, TU Wien, VetMedUni Vienna, Vienna University of Economics and Business, and Austrian Economic Chambers (WKO).
Researchers from University of Leeds and Cardiff University published a new paper in the Journal of Marketing that examines the nature, functioning, and performance relevance of Machiavellianism in alliance partnerships.
The study, forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing, is titled “Machiavellianism in Alliance Partnerships” and is authored by Giuseppe Musarra, Matthew Robson, and Constantine Katsikeas.
Alliances are an essential component of a firm’s strategic arsenal for thriving in today’s hyper-competitive marketplace. They serve as a mechanism for partners to implement their agendas and achieve marketing-related goals (e.g., develop new product and enter new markets). Yet, many alliances underperform. Given the large investments firms make to form and manage alliances, it is crucial to address such a real-world marketing problem.
A fundamental issue is that both the bright side and dark side of alliances shape their effectiveness. Alliances offer a platform for joint learning that can serve the interests of the partnership (bright side) or they can foster learning-related exploitation and the use of power to prioritize one’s own goals (dark side). The tension between these routes can be used by an alliance partner with Machiavellian characteristics.
“Machiavellianism in an alliance is a firm’s strategy of social conduct that involves manipulation of the partner for own gain, often against its best interests. Our interviews with executives confirm that Machiavellianism resonates strongly in the marketing alliance context,” says Musarra. For example, one CEO commented that “For companies like mine, tie-ups are a unique vehicle that offer great opportunities to benefit from the partner and its skills. We are masters of manipulation.”
Like other social psychology constructs transferred from the individual to the firm level, Machiavellianism is partly dispositional (internal beliefs) and partly manifest (behavioral). The researchers did not find evidence that Machiavellianism is a fixed, firm-level disposition. Instead, the interviewees were convinced their firm’s Machiavellianism and its dimensions (i.e., distrust in the partner, desire for status, amoral manipulation, and desire for control) vary across alliance settings. For instance, the managing director of a marketing alliance was adamant that “It can change. Our motives, needs, and desire to lead in the production of new skills … change, as it is often easier to chalk up another victory by deceiving rather than leading.”
The main study examines a firm’s Machiavellianism as a driver of its performance effectiveness in the alliance via learning and power mechanisms. Machiavellianism harms performance by: (a) weakening motivations to develop and learn new knowledge with the partner (i.e., collaborative learning); (b) strengthening motivations related to anxiety about failing to access and learn new knowledge from the partner (i.e., learning anxiety); and (c) increasing the use of power to dominate the alliance’s agenda.
While Machiavellianism naturally drives learning anxiety, it can encourage collaborative learning when there is situational knowledge furnished by collaborative history. The path to use of power is unaffected by collaborative history. Using history to understand the situation opens the way for Machiavellian pragmatists to favor bright-side (collaborative) learning over the more intuitive dark-side (anxiety) route in the race to learn. Using collaborative history, moderating conditions can benefit performance by neutralizing the negative performance effects of Machiavellianism through collaborative learning and learning anxiety, but not use of power.
The study’s quasi-longitudinal study shows that learning and power effects take time to unfold. Robson says that “Performance outcomes of learning are contingent on the alliance development stage. We observe an inverted U-shaped moderation at the alliance development stage on the paths from collaborative learning and learning anxiety to performance. Once an alliance partnership is past its peak, opportunities fade for both learning-related mechanisms.”
The researchers also observe that the competitive mechanism, use of power, appears to be problematic because it is resistant to the conditioning effects of both knowledge built via collaborative history and the alliance development stage. Machiavellian use of power to dominate the alliance’s agenda is a key concern for alliance management.
“Machiavellian firms’ preoccupation with dark-side learning anxiety and use of power could preclude a focus on collaborative learning, to the detriment of performance. Still, it is important that managers factor into their planning the conditioning effects of alliance situational factors like collaborative history,” advises Katsikeas.
Understanding how to identify a Machiavellian partner is beneficial for practitioners because such partners are adept at creating the illusion of cooperation. The researchers’ interviews uncovered manifestations of Machiavellianism’s behavioral side that would allow the detection of a Machiavellian partner. Machiavellian firms are likely to exhibit behaviors that reflect its dimensions, such as hypervigilance, authoritative work patterns, and calculative adaptations.
Firms may find it prudent to set up an alliance with a partner with Machiavellian characteristics, provided the partner offers a good fit of capabilities for the alliance work. The challenge facing managers is to surface this partner’s Machiavellianism and suppress its deleterious effects until they can find value in collaborative learning.
The Journal of Marketing develops and disseminates knowledge about real-world marketing questions useful to scholars, educators, managers, policy makers, consumers, and other societal stakeholders around the world. Published by the American Marketing Association since its founding in 1936, JM has played a significant role in shaping the content and boundaries of the marketing discipline. Christine Moorman (T. Austin Finch, Sr. Professor of Business Administration at the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University) serves as the current Editor in Chief. http://www.ama.org/jm
About the American Marketing Association (AMA)
As the largest chapter-based marketing association in the world, the AMA is trusted by marketing and sales professionals to help them discover what is coming next in the industry. The AMA has a community of local chapters in more than 70 cities and 350 college campuses throughout North America. The AMA is home to award-winning content, PCM® professional certification, premiere academic journals, and industry-leading training events and conferences. https://www.ama.org
People are more likely to choose a healthy food option than an unhealthy food option among people from different social groups because they fear being judged negatively for their choices.
New research, co-authored by Bayes Business School, found that that the presence of individuals from different friendship or social groups played a role in influencing consumers’ food choices.
The study, which explored food choices with those of a different race and from a different university, explains this occurs because individuals anticipate more negative judgement from outsiders. The research, which spoke to around 1,000 individuals in total, shows that people often self-categorise in terms of their race, university affiliation, and work affiliation.
Experiments with several hundred adults in a large US city and university found participants were more likely to choose a healthy snack in the presence of an observer of a different race (as opposed to the same race) or one affiliated with a different university (as opposed to their own university). This was because they anticipated more negative judgment from an outsider group, and they therefore attempted to mitigate these judgments by making healthier food choices.
Four separate experiments supported the authors’ view that the presence of a stranger from a different social group (compared to a stranger from one’s own group – such as their own university) impacted the participants’ food choice.
In one experiment, 180 students were offered the choice between indulgent M&Ms and healthier raisins as a snack. When in the presence of an unknown fellow student from one’s own university, only 12 per cent of students selected the healthier raisins. However, this number more than doubled to 31 per cent when in the presence of an unknown student from another university.
The other experiments showed that the reason for this pattern is that people feel judged to a larger extent by outgroup members, and they strategically use healthy food choices to make a positive impression to counter this negative judgement. For example, 200 consumers were told that others around them were judgemental or were tolerant. In the judgemental environment, consumers were more likely to choose carrots over cookies than in the tolerant environment, which indicates that expected judgement from others explains the findings.
Last month the Action on Sugar and Obesity Health Alliance called on the UK Government to act against the difference in sugar content and portion size of popular snacks. Despite many attempts to help consumers make healthier choices, consumers often struggle to maintain a healthy diet. This research finds that one way to promote a healthy diet could be to advertise the social benefits of healthy choices.
Dr Janina Steinmetz, Associate Professor (Reader) of Marketing at Bayes, said the findings have practical implications for marketers of healthy foods and policy makers hoping to promote healthy eating.
“We know that food plays an important role in social life and consumers often make inferences about others’ traits and characteristics based on their food choices.
“Our research shows that we can use this important role of food for consumer welfare if we highlight that healthy food is not only good for consumers, but also helps them to impress others. These findings could be very significant to those hoping to improve healthy eating practices in the UK because they open a new avenue to promote the benefits of healthy eating: It’s good for you and your health, and it’s also good for making a positive impression.”
Feeling Judged? How the Presence of Outgroup Members Promotes Healthier Food Choices, by Dr Janina Steinmetz, Reader of Marketing at Bayes Business School; Maferima Toure-Tillery, Associate Professor of Marketing at Northwestern University, USA; and Blake Dicosola, PhD student at the University of Oxford is published in Psychology & Marketing.
Ends
JOURNAL
Psychology and Marketing
Study finds realism a key factor in driving engagement with virtual reality videos
A recent study finds that realism is a key factor in determining whether viewers engage with virtual reality (VR) videos – and that engagement is itself a key factor in determining whether viewers are interested in watching VR videos in the future.
The researchers focused on VR videos that offer a 360-degree view of a given scene that viewers can navigate on conventional video screens; VR headsets were not required.
For the study, researchers surveyed 1,422 study participants located in the United States, all of whom had previous experience with virtual reality videos. Participants were asked a series of questions designed to explore both which factors drew them to VR videos and what elements of the videos increased viewer engagement.
“We found there were two aspects of virtual reality videos that were the most powerful predictors of whether viewers enjoyed VR videos and engaged with their content,” says Yang Cheng, first author of the study and an associate professor of communication at North Carolina State University. “Specifically, we found that realism and enjoyment were the key variables here. Another variable that contributed to user engagement was whether the VR videos were part of an interactive platform that allowed users to establish a sense of community.
“Our study is the first to identify that realism in these videos is a key variable in driving viewer engagement,” Cheng says. “And the more engaged viewers were, the more likely they were to want to view additional VR videos in the future.”
The researchers note that their findings can be used by video developers to improve user engagement and encourage continued use of immersive videos.
Researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have studied how the screen habits of US children correlates with how their cognitive abilities develop over time. They found that the children who spent an above-average time playing video games increased their intelligence more than the average, while TV watching or social media had neither a positive nor a negative effect. The results are published in the journal Scientific Reports.
Children are spending more and more time in front of screens. How this affects their health and whether it has a positive or negative impact on their cognitive abilities are hotly debated. For this present study, researchers at Karolinska Institutet and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam specifically studied the link between screen habits and intelligence over time.
Over 9,000 boys and girls in the USA participated in the study. At the age of nine or ten, the children performed a battery of psychological tests to gauge their general cognitive abilities (intelligence). The children and their parents were also asked about how much time the children spent watching TV and videos, playing video games and engaging with social media.
Followed up after two years
Just over 5,000 of the children were followed up after two years, at which point they were asked to repeat the psychological tests. This enabled the researchers to study how the children’s performance on the tests varied from the one testing session to the other, and to control for individual differences in the first test. They also controlled for genetic differences that could affect intelligence and differences that could be related to the parents’ educational background and income.
On average, the children spent 2.5 hours a day watching TV, half an hour on social media and 1 hour playing video games. The results showed that those who played more games than the average increased their intelligence between the two measurements by approximately 2.5 IQ points more than the average. No significant effect was observed, positive or negative, of TV-watching or social media.
“We didn’t examine the effects of screen behaviour on physical activity, sleep, wellbeing or school performance, so we can’t say anything about that,” says Torkel Klingberg, professor of cognitive neuroscience at the Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet. “But our results support the claim that screen time generally doesn’t impair children’s cognitive abilities, and that playing video games can actually help boost intelligence. This is consistent with several experimental studies of video-game playing.”
Intelligence is not constant
The results are also in line with recent research showing that intelligence is not a constant, but a quality that is influenced by environmental factors.
“We’ll now be studying the effects of other environmental factors and how the cognitive effects relate to childhood brain development,” says Torkel Klingberg.
One limitation of the study is that it only covered US children and did not differentiate between different types of video games, which makes the results difficult to transfer to children in other countries with other gaming habits. There was also a risk of reporting error since screen time and habits were self-rated.
The study was financed by the Swedish Research Council and the Strategic Research Area Neuroscience (StratNeuro) at Karolinska Institutet. The researchers report no conflicts of interest.
For decades, autism research has relied on data collected during lab tasks or interviews with clinicians that are more constrained than the child’s day-to-day interactions with others. A study published in the journal Current Biology on May 12 challenges the status quo by observing toddlers in more natural play settings. By using a head-mounted camera to track kids’ eye movements as they played with toys, scientists observed that children with autism achieved joint attention—measured by time spent looking at the same toy at the same time as their parent—at typical levels.
To understand how children interact with social partners in more comfortable and natural settings, Julia Yurkovic-Harding, an autism researcher at Indiana University, was among the first to use a dual head-mounted eye-tracking method with children with autism to study social interactions between the children and their parents. “The head-mounted eye tracking allows us to get precision in measuring their visual attention and manual action but allows us to let the children play more naturally,” says Yurkovic-Harding (@YurkovicHarding), the co-first author on the study.
Children who fall on the autism spectrum often have difficulty following a social partner’s eyes. This behavior, called gaze following, is a key part of how autism researchers tend to define joint attention. However, researchers who use head-mounted eye tracking to study the development of typically developing children recently found that children don’t look at their parents’ faces very often when they’re playing with toys together. This means that gaze following might not be an available cue for achieving joint attention in some more natural settings. Instead, typically developing children follow their parent’s hands, which are often touching or holding toys, as a way to know what their parent is looking at.
An assessment of data gathered during play sessions with a group of 50 kids aged 2 to 4 found that autistic children maintained joint attention at levels consistent with their neurotypical peers. These results were exciting to Yurkovic-Harding. “Every time that you find something that's typical and intact in children with autism, there's this opportunity to explore,” she says. Additionally, the children with autism also used hand-following rather than gaze-following cues to follow their parent’s attention into joint attention.
Experiences where a child focuses on an activity, like playing with a toy truck or building with blocks, together with a parent are thought to support language development. The current study found that parents of children with autism spectrum disorder named toys more frequently when they were in joint attention together compared to when they weren’t looking at the same toy. Yurkovic-Harding and her team hope that by identifying times when kids with autism are able to play in more typical ways, adults can encourage autistic children to do more of these activities and allow for more chances for learning.
“We need to push to understand the everyday lives of individuals with autism, the social pressures that they face day to day, and the social context that they interact in so we can help them exist in the social world that's all around us in a way that is comfortable and confident for them,” she says.
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This work was supported by funding from the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Research Foundation and National Institutes of Health.
Current Biology (@CurrentBiology), published by Cell Press, is a bimonthly journal that features papers across all areas of biology. Current Biology strives to foster communication across fields of biology, both by publishing important findings of general interest and through highly accessible front matter for non-specialists. Visit: http://www.cell.com/current-biology. To receive Cell Press media alerts, contact press@cell.com.
