Back at the start of the month, when most of us were presumably focused on recovering from New Years festivities, Science released a perspective that discussed the role of games and other media in the development of cognitive skills. There is little doubt that the majority of kids are now immersed in an environment that's rich in visual media, from television to online content, which represents a major shift from the developmental environment experienced by earlier generations. The perspective points out that this is clearly going to impact the skills people develop as they mature, and argues that we should be making adjustments for that.

The perspective was authored by Patricia Greenfield of UCLA, and she begins by emphasizing the role of what she terms "informal education." Although this will include basic language and social skills, as well as factual information, Greenfield emphasizes that informal learning often involves the development of learning skills themselves. With the frequent use of educational DVDs and television programs, children are becoming adept at processing visual media and incorporating it into their educational process. Not surprisingly, this change has consequences for intellectual development.

Greenfield points out that this doesn't make the visual media good or bad, just different. For example, she notes that scores from verbal IQ tests, which emphasize basic vocabulary, are going up at the same time that verbal SAT scores, which emphasize a complex vocabulary, have dropped.

More dramatically, she describes what's termed the Flynn effect, after a pioneering study on the topic of visual reasoning skills. Test scores of visual reasoning dating from the 1940s were dramatically lower than when those same tests were performed in more recent years. The results also suggested a reduced performance with age in the past, a trend that's largely vanished in more recent years. These trends have now been reported for a number of cultures, suggesting that immersion in visual media is resulting in a generation with enhanced visual reasoning skills. The piece also notes studies that indicate that the complexity of visual media, especially games, has improved the ability of students to multitask.

The downside of multitasking

There are clearly significant advantages to multitasking abilities—I'm quite glad that the pilots of the US Air flight that landed in the Hudson could both keep the plane airborne and make rational decisions about where to land it, for example. But, in a variety of learning environments, multitasking splits attention in a way that prevents the internalization of the primary content. Students who were given the standard CNN feed with a headline crawl remembered less about the primary news stories than those who were given a feed without the crawl. Similarly, students that were given laptops and allowed to look up terms and concepts during a lecture didn't do as well as their laptop-free peers in a quiz given afterwards.

Greenfield also cites some studies that focus on aspects of learning and behavior that are less easy to quantify. For example, she cites the studies that correlate violent media consumption with aggressive behavior, and others that indicate that students with reduced TV time traded intellectual impulsivity for more reflective analysis. Similarly, those taught through visual media had a better recall of the information, but were less able to develop creative extrapolations from it.

This sort of emphasis on tradeoffs—impulsivity and recall can be very valuable in some contexts—is made explicit in the conclusions. "However, the preceding makes it clear that no one medium can do everything," Greenfield writes. "Every medium has its strengths and weaknesses; every medium develops some cognitive skills at the expense of others." It's a refreshing change from the one-sided condemnations of media that occur far too often.

Because she recognizes that both forms of skills have their place, Greenfield advocates a balanced approach to the rising tide of visual content obtained through informal education. First, she argues that schools should emphasize textual materials during the learning process in order to provide a counterbalance to the informal learning environment. But, for testing purposes, we could do a better job of providing a more balanced approach than the typical all-text method of evaluating skills and recall.

Science, 2009. DOI: 10.1126/science.1167190