An 8-Year Study Found That Kids With More Screen Time Had Better Cognitive Skills Than Teenagers

An eight-year Finnish study tracking 260 children has found an unexpected association between screen time and cognitive ability: children who accumulated more screen time as they grew up tended to show better cognitive processing during adolescence, a finding that runs counter to widespread assumptions about screens being uniformly harmful to developing minds. The research comes from the PANIC study on children's physical activity and nutrition at the University of Jyväskylä, which followed 124 girls and 136 boys with an average age of 15.8 years, measuring their physical activity and sedentary behavior using both survey questionnaires and devices that tracked heart rate and movement, and evaluating their learning, attention, and working memory using the CogState test battery. Doctoral Researcher Petri Jalanko, who led the current analysis, said the findings suggest that screen time can support children's and adolescents' cognitive processing, and that the essential factor is what kinds of things they are doing during that screen time. Digital activities involving learning, creativity, problem-solving, or other forms of active mental engagement could help explain the association the researchers observed between screen time and stronger cognitive outcomes.

The study also examined the relationship between physical activity and cognitive performance, and found that the picture there is considerably more complex. Among girls, greater amounts of light-intensity physical activity from childhood were associated with better working memory during adolescence. Among boys, greater participation in guided physical activity from childhood through adolescence was linked to better working memory. An unexpected pattern also emerged around unsupervised exercise: lower levels of self-reported unsupervised physical activity were actually associated with better cognitive processing, a result the researchers say may reflect differences in the mental demands of structured versus unstructured activity. Importantly, physical activity measured directly by sensor devices showed no association with cognitive processing at all, which the researchers suggest may be because sensors can measure movement but cannot determine what a person is actually doing or thinking during activity or rest. Jalanko was careful to say the findings show associations rather than proving causation, and emphasized the need for intervention studies to establish causal relationships and explore sex differences more specifically. His practical conclusion was not that screens are good and exercise is complicated, but that neither should be approached with a blanket rule: the goal should be balance between physical activity and screen use that actively promotes thinking, creativity, and learning rather than passive consumption.

Source:https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/08/260815064803.htm