A recently published study states that The continued vision of SpongeBob cartoons can cause children attention deficit and difficulties both to solve problems and to present "moderate" behavior.
If the popular yellow character and his friends already fell on suspicion of being too violent a series, now with this new "accusation" we will surely pay more attention to what our children see on the screen.
But, before the alarms go off (or to extend it…), we will say that the conclusions do not refer specifically to SpongeBob but to the "fast pace" cartoon.
These conclusions are reached after exposing groups of four-year-old children to various cartoons, some of fast pace (SpongeBob) and others of slower and slow pace (such as Caillou). A third group of children dedicated themselves to drawing freely.
The researchers determined that the cartoon of the sponge was fast, because its scenes change rapidly, every 11 seconds on average. On the contrary, slow-paced drawings change the scene every 34 seconds on average. After nine minutes of watching the thrilling episodes there were immediate negative effects on four-year-olds.
The study notes that parents should be aware that fast-paced television programs could, at least temporarily, alter the executive function of young children. After viewing or coloring, each child was given a set of exercises designed to test aspects of executive function such as working memory, attention and self-regulation.
Recall that the executive function is a set of cognitive skills that allow the anticipation and setting of goals, the design of plans, the start of mental activities and operations, self-regulation and monitoring of tasks, the precise selection of behaviors and behaviors, flexibility in cognitive work and its organization in time and space
Definitely, the little ones who saw SpongeBob were more prone to attention deficit and more problems when solving problems, according to the results published in the journal Pediatrics, unlike the children who saw the other drawings or who colored.
The research has been conducted by experts from the American University of Virginia, and notes that the effect of cartoons of this style on children's brains is that, as with SpongeBob, "can jeopardize the ability to learn from their children or their self-control skills".
I think these results would be the same if we expose children to heavy music, unlike if what they hear is classical music, even for a few minutes. You just have to think about how we would respond ourselves to do any task after those different, more or less concentrated rhythms ...
However, the same researchers do not exaggerate the scope of the results, which only analyze results after nine minutes of seeing drawings (Will the negative effects be greater after the continued vision of SpongeBob?) and point out that more studies are needed in this regard.
