Digital imprints: Media use, sleep, and cognition in infancy

• Applicants: Dr. Carolin Konrad; Professorin Dr. Sabine Seehagen
• Subject Area: Developmental and Educational Psychology
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 448036156

Human infants spend more than half of their time asleep. Recent developmental research has shown that this state is important for aspects of early memory functioning. However, it is unclear which further cognitive processes might benefit from sleep. In addition, there might be aspects of infants’ everyday experiences that help or hinder sleep’s effects on cognition. The overarching aim of the proposed project is to test causal relations between media use, sleep, and cognition in the second year of life. In Experiment 1, we will test the effect of media use within an hour of bedtime on 15- and 24-month-old infants’ cognitive functioning the next day. Infants will be randomly assigned to watch age-appropriate media content either in the morning or in the evening for three consecutive days. On the following day, divergent thinking, learning and generalization, and visual recognition of emotional faces will be assessed. Broadly, we predict that evening media use will lead to lower performance on all cognitive measures and that effects will be particularly pronounced in the most challenging tasks. We also predict that the effects of media use on cognition will be mediated by sleep quality, and that evening media use will lead to suppression of melatonin secretion. In Experiments 2a and 2b we will assess the role of sleep for memory consolidation of information presented on screen media versus information presented live. In both Experiments, 15- and 24-month-old infants will be presented with live and televised information during a learning event and their retention of that information will be assessed after a 24-hr delay. In Exp. 2b only, caregivers will provide verbal scaffolding during the initial learning event. To assess the effect of sleep, infants will be randomly assigned to a nap or a wake condition so that they either will or will not take an extended nap within 4 hours of the learning event. Broadly, we predict that retention of televised information will only benefit from post-encoding sleep in the presence of caregiver scaffolding. Overall, the findings of the proposed project will help reveal how basic everyday experiences – sleep, media use, infant-parent interactions – shape cognitive development. As such they will be relevant from a basic and applied developmental as well as from a developmental psychopathology perspective.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: United Kingdom, USA
• Cooperation Partners: Professorin Dr. Rachel Barr; Jane S. Herbert, Ph.D.