Taxing toon (Image: © 2011 Viacom International Inc. All rights reserved)

Does SpongeBob SquarePants “impair little kids’ thinking”? May it “harm children’s brains”? It does and it may, according to the Los Angeles Times and news agency Bloomberg, respectively, in their accounts of a study published this week. A closer look at the study, however, suggests Nickelodeon’s cartoon has been unduly maligned.

Of all the shows on television that might warp children’s brains, SpongeBob hardly seems a prime culprit. Created by former marine biologist Stephen Hillenburg, the quirky animated serial follows the antics of a talking yellow sea sponge and his friends in the ocean-floor town of Bikini Bottom.

Angeline Lillard and Jennifer Peterson of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville recruited 60 4-year-olds for their study. Twenty toddlers watched a 9-minute clip from an episode of SpongeBob. Another 20 watched 9 minutes of Caillou, a Canadian cartoon that follows the everyday life of a 4-year-old child. A third group of 20 doodled with crayons and markers for 9 minutes.


Lillard and Peterson wanted to compare the immediate influence of fast-paced and slow-paced television shows on children’s abilities to solve problems, delay gratification and direct attention – a group of cognitive skills collectively known as executive function. As such Caillou provided a good contrast to SpongeBob: the camera angle or scene changes about every 34 seconds in the former and every 11 seconds in the latter.

Following the TV viewing or doodling, the three groups of toddlers performed various tests, such as learning to touch their toes when told to touch their head and vice versa, or reciting a string of digits in reverse. Lillard and Peterson found that the toddlers who had watched Caillou or doodled performed better on every task than those who had watched SpongeBob.

Brain drain

The Los Angeles Times and Bloomberg have taken this to mean that a zany show like SpongeBob essentially makes kids dumb, whereas a show like Caillou – created by child developmental psychologists – boosts brainpower – but that’s not what the study concludes at all.

“Saying that SpongeBob is making you dumber is very different than saying a child’s attention is temporarily impaired and that we don’t know what the long-term impacts are,” explains Lillard.

Instead, the study reinforces something psychologists have been emphasising in recent years: that all our cognitive abilities – attention, decision-making, willpower – are resources that are taxed and fatigued throughout the day, just like our muscles.

SpongeBob‘s exhilarating pace taxes viewers’ attention in a very different way from doodling or watching the unhurried Caillou. “Drawing requires planning and the pace of Caillou challenges kids to wait a little longer before they find out what happens next,” explains Eugene Geist of Ohio University in Athens, who has previously studied how television influences attention.

In contrast, SpongeBob swiftly soaks up the viewer’s pool of attention. Kids watching SpongeBob must devote a lot of cognitive resources just to keep track of what’s happening on screen, whereas Caillou offers viewers much more time to process events in the narrative. So the toddlers who had watched SpongeBob probably did not have as much attention to devote to the executive-function tests as the toddlers who had watched Caillou.

That means that watching a rollicking show like SpongeBob before a spelling test is probably not the best idea, but it certainly does not mean that SpongeBob is hurting kids’ brains or permanently impairing children’s ability to think clearly.

Journal reference: Pediatrics, DOI: 10.1542/peds.2010-1919