What does more screen time mean for how children see and focus?

Researchers tested how children process color, luminance, motion, and competing visual information to explore whether everyday screen exposure is linked to different patterns of visual processing as they grow.

Study: Screen time is differentially related to visual selective attention and visual feature processing across middle childhood. Image Credit: Dimron Co / Shutterstock

Want to read later? Download your clean, ad-free, print-friendly PDF copy by clicking here.

Background

Children born in the modern era have ready access to numerous digital devices, contributing to substantial daily screen exposure. A growing body of evidence has linked greater screen time to attention difficulties in children, including inattention, hyperactivity, and distractibility.

Among various attentional processes, visual attention may be uniquely affected by screen exposure due to its strong reliance on visual input. The development of visual selective attention, which is required to separate relevant visual information from irrelevant information, continues from infancy through adolescence.

Screen-based activities often involve rapid scene transitions and competing visual features, which can potentially influence the development of visual selective attention. Repeated exposure to such activities may shape the development of attentional orienting, distractor suppression, and visual feature processing.

The well-documented link between screen time and attention difficulties in children underscores the need to examine how screen use relates to visual attention and visual processing throughout childhood.

The current study aimed to address this particular area of cognitive development by analyzing data from a final sample of 72 children aged 4 to 9 years who initially performed a contrast sensitivity task, followed by a feature search task and a conjunction visual search task. Children’s demographic characteristics and screen time-related information were collected from their caregivers. The number of children included in individual task analyses ranged from 59 to 71 after excluding incomplete data and outliers.

A contrast sensitivity task measures how well children can distinguish the orientation of visual patterns presented at varying levels of luminance or color contrast. A feature search task measures the user’s ability to identify a single target object among distractors that differ by a unique visual feature, such as color, shape, or orientation. A conjunction visual search task measures the user’s ability to identify a single target object defined by multiple visual features among distractors that share some, but not all, of the target features. In this study, the targets combined color or luminance with motion.

Key findings

The assessment of the relationship between children’s screen time and their performance on various visual tasks revealed that greater daily screen time was associated with lower contrast sensitivity, regardless of the visual features. However, this association was no longer statistically significant when screen time was analyzed using the original categorical response groups rather than midpoint-based continuous estimates.

Regarding the feature search task, the analysis revealed that at both lower and higher modeled levels of screen time, older age was significantly associated with better task performance in both the luminance and color conditions. However, the association between age and performance was significantly weaker for luminance than for color feature search at higher modeled levels of screen time. These lower and higher values represented model estimates at one standard deviation below and above the sample mean, rather than separate groups of children.

Sensitivity analysis also suggested that the feature-search pattern at higher screen time was partly influenced by the oldest children, who had relatively high screen exposure. As with contrast sensitivity, the feature-search effect was attenuated and no longer statistically significant when screen time was retained in its original categorical form.

A similar association was observed between age and conjunction-search performance for both luminance and color conjunction search at lower and higher modeled levels of screen time. However, at lower modeled levels of screen time, the association between age and performance was significantly stronger for color than for luminance conjunction search. In contrast to the other two tasks, the conjunction-search findings remained significant and showed a similar pattern in the categorical sensitivity analysis.

Regarding differences in performance costs by age, the analysis showed greater conjunction-search performance costs as the number of distractors increased among older children than among younger children at lower modeled levels of screen time. The performance measure combined reaction time and error rate rather than assessing speed and accuracy independently.

Study significance

The study reveals that caregiver-reported screen exposure is differentially associated with both visual processing and visual attentional processes in children aged 4 to 9 years.

The observed association between greater daily screen time and lower contrast sensitivity suggests that greater screen exposure may be associated with modestly lower basic visual processing performance. However, this finding should be interpreted cautiously because it weakened when screen time was analyzed categorically.

Notably, the study suggests that associations between a child’s age and visual search performance varied by modeled screen time and by the type of visual features involved in the task. Overall, the exploratory findings suggest that luminance-based visual and attentional processing may be more sensitive to variations in daily screen exposure across middle childhood. However, age-related slopes within individual feature conditions did not differ significantly across screen-time levels.

One possible explanation for this observation, proposed by the researchers, is that visually complex screen environments often contain rapidly changing luminance, motion, and contrast information that may place particular demands on attentional systems involved in processing these features. However, the study did not distinguish between specific types or content of screen use, so this explanation remains speculative.

The study also finds a larger decline in conjunction search performance as the number of distractors increases among older children with lower modeled screen exposure. The authors speculated that the attentional demands imposed by screen-based activities may vary as children mature and engage with increasingly complex forms of media.

Taken together, the study provides preliminary behavioral evidence about associations between screen use and visual attention across middle childhood. Importantly, the findings do not indicate that screen exposure uniformly improves or impairs visual attention; associations vary by task demands and visual features.

However, because of the cross-sectional design, the study could not draw causal or directional conclusions from the observed associations. Age-related differences also cannot be interpreted as changes occurring within individual children over time.

The possibility of reverse causation cannot be fully ignored. There remains a possibility that children with different attentional profiles are differentially drawn to screen use or are provided with screens more frequently by caregivers. Caregiver-reported screen time may also be affected by recall or reporting bias, and relatively few children had high levels of screen exposure.

Larger-scale research with a longitudinal design is needed to clarify how screen use and visual attention relate within individuals over time and whether specific forms of screen use have distinct effects on visual processing and attention.

Journal reference:

• Keşşafoğlu, D., Nketia, J., Amso, D., & Lynn, A. (2026). Screen time is differentially related to visual selective attention and visual feature processing across middle childhood. Scientific Reports. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-026-68559-7, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-026-68559-7