Longitudinal fMRI scans of high vs low technology users
What do we want to know?
While social media and screen time are often singled out as major causal factors in the ongoing adolescent mental health crisis, research performed to date does not offer a clear or even consistent picture of the relationships. The results suggest more complex dynamics involving many factors that are often not included in studies that assess technology use. For example, children and adolescents are subject to many contexts and environments, including home, school, and recreation. Families, school and extracurricular demands vary significantly, creating a heterogeneous pool of stressors that will differentially affect children and adolescents.
An important question concerning development in the age of technology and AI is whether or not significant changes in either brain structure or functional activity occur in connection with certain kinds of technology use. Development is contingent on genetic, environmental and social factors, each of which may contribute differently depending on the particular context of an individual child or adolescent. Since many studies that examine screen time or social media use do so as part of a larger survey, such as the Monitoring the Future study, important contextual information about genetic, environmental and social factors that may explain patterns of technology use is often not available. While some work has focused on the relationship of screen time or particular aspects of social media and some mental health outcomes, very little work has been done in a manner that can also speak to the broader experience of children and adolescents. Further, almost no research has collected data regarding usage disaggregated by platform, time of day, frequency of checking, etc. so as to be able to assess the evolution of technology use over time as development progresses. Finally, even studies of brain development using fMRI rarely make direct links between neural functioning and technology use more broadly.
How will we study it?
In order to gain a comprehensive understanding of how technology use impacts neural development and behavior in daily life, we will employ a multitude of methods across both the lab and at home. In addition, we will enroll participants across a wide age range, from the onset of adolescence through adulthood, in order to assess differences in the effects of technology across age. In the lab, participants will undergo an fMRI scan every 6 months for 3 years. During these scans, participants will undergo a battery of psychological tasks that target executive functioning, attention, and emotion reactivity and regulation. By scanning participants on a regular basis, we will not only be able to understand the relationship between technology use and neural functioning at any particular point in time, but will also be able to track how changes in technology use are related to changes in basic neural functioning. Behaviorally, we will also gather responses on a number of different surveys, including a social scale to measure friend networks, a survey about parenting style and family dynamics, a technology use survey.
Our goal is to comprehensively explore the effects of technology use in daily life on behavior and neural functioning, so we will also gather different types of data outside of the lab. Primarily, this entails using Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA), in which participants are prompted on their smartphone to respond to a short survey at various times throughout the day about their technology use and emotional state on that day, and sleep quality the night before. We plan to supplement our EMA data with both physiological data and smartphone use data. Physiological data, including resting heart rate and sleep quality, may be collected via a wearable device, such as a Whoop Band or a Fitbit. Smartphone use data will be collected via built-in phone use features on smartphones (such as the Screen Time feature on iPhones) in order to objectively assess how often participants used their phones each day and what types of activity (i.e. communicating, browsing the internet, entertainment) they engaged in. Collecting physiological and behavioral activity alongside EMA questions about technology use will allow us to gain an understanding of how perceptions about one’s own technology use differ from actual use.
What would our findings mean?
Comprehensively indexing the environments of children and adolescents, alongside patterns of technology use, will shed light on observed changes in development, both behaviorally and neurally. Technology use may differentially impact behavior depending on the child’s home environment, and other measures of health, such as sleep and exercise, may exacerbate the effects of high technology use. Our study will be able to comprehensively connect child development with technology use, while accounting for the complex web of factors children experience in their daily lives. A better understanding of the interactions between these factors will inform policy and regulatory priorities related to internet use by children and adolescents.
