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Molly was a busy, cherubic fourteen-month-old still unsteady on her feet. She hung onto a bookcase and doggedly yanked toys off the shelves. One, two, three brightly coloured blocks dropped to the floor…..
Then abruptly, she stood stock still and swiveled her head toward a big television set at one end of the room, entranced by the image of a singing, swaying Baby Elmo.
“What’s happening is she’s being pulled away by the TV all the time, rather than making a behavioral decision to watch TV,” says Dan Anderson, a psychology professor who along with two Graduate students are observing Molly and her Mother through a two-way mirror.
The University of Massachusetts professor, studies heart rate, eye-tracking and an array of other measures to understand what happens when we watch television. On average, both adults and children look at and away from a TV set up to 150 times an hour. A phenomenon called “attentional inertia.”
When a show is either too fast and stimulating or too calm and slow, our attention slips away. Television attracts us because its content can challenge our cognition. But foremost, its quick cuts and rapid imagery are designed to keep tugging at our natural inclination to orient toward the shiny, the bright, the mobile, to whatever we find eye-catching in our environment. It’s ingenious: entertainment that hooks us by appealing to out very instincts for survival. This is why very young viewers like Molly are entertained by the plethora of new “educational” shows and DVDs aimed at them,even though they understand little and likely learn little from this fare. Push and pull,back and forth, television is in essence an interruption machine, the most powerful attention slicer yet invented.
Just step into the room with the enticing glow, and life changes.
This was the intriguing discovery that Anderson made while exploring the gaze of the tiniest watchers, the final frontier of TV viewership. In all the years that he and others sought to probe the question of how much we attend to television, no one thought to ask to how television changed off-screen life during an on-air moment. Anderson and his team recently discovered that television influences family life even when kids don’t seem to be watching. When a game show is on, children ages one to three play with toys for half the amount of time and show up to 25% less focus in their play than they do when the TV is off.
In other words they exhibit key characteristics- abbreviated and less focused play –of attention-deficient children. They begin to look like junior multi-taskers, moving from toy to toy, forgetting what they were doing when they were interrupted by an interesting snippet of the show. Not surprisingly, parents in turn are distracted,interacting 20% less with their kids and relating passively- “That’s nice dear” or: Don’t bother me, I’m watching TV”- when they do. Now consider that more than half the children ages eight to eighteen live in homes where TV is on most of the time.
Factor in the screens in the waiting rooms, airport, classroom, back-seat of the car. Then zoom out and remember that television is just one element in a daily deluge of screens that split our focus.
Wherever Molly’s gaze falls, whenever she turns, whomever she talks to, she’ll likely experience divided attention.
She being groomed for a multi-tasking, interrupt driven world.And she doesn’t need Elmo to teach her that.
Extract from, ‘Distracted’, The Erosion of Attention and the Coming of the Dark Age.By Maggie Jackson. Published by Prometheus Books
