The headline and the article don't match up at all:
> The National Institutes of Health announced today that enrollment for the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study is now complete and, in early 2019, scientists will have access to baseline data from all ABCD Study participants.
It's very interesting though, but the title really needs to be changed, so more people can see this:
The current link has the text, "For example, a recent study by ABCD investigators showed associations between differing amounts and kinds of screen time (e.g., video games vs. social media) and different structural brain characteristics, psychological traits, and cognitive function," linking to https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105381191... a paper "Screen media activity and brain structure in youth: Evidence for diverse structural correlation networks from the ABCD study," whose abstract ends, "Taken together, these findings support the notion of [screen media activity] related maturational coupling or structural correlation networks in the brain and provides evidence that individual differences of these networks have mixed consequences for psychopathology and cognitive performance." It's unfortunately an Elsevier paper, but I think my alma mater still gives me access. Let me see what it says and try to summarize....
OK, I've read the article and it is hard for me to follow concrete observations and exactly how much change there is (probably because I'm not an expert in the field and it's also 2 AM here). If I'm reading it right, they did a "group factor analysis" using R to identify 4 hypothetical variables with nontrivial correlation between both their screen time survey questions and the brain measurements from the NIH ABCD study. They believe they found some correlation between more screen time in general and more "externalizing behavior," and also some between more gaming and more "fluid intelligence".
More interestingly, they caution, "First, this is a cross-sectional assessment, which enables establishment of associations but does not allow drawing causal inferences.Although multivariate methods such as [group factor analysis] enable differential examination of the impact of [social media activity] and structural brain characteristics on outcome variables, they cannot address the 'chicken and egg' question.Therefore, the longitudinal component of ABCD is essential to begin to delineate causal longitudinal pathways." (ABCD is a long-term study as these children grow; they did this paper based on a single snapshot of the data.) They also state, "This diversity of findings provides an important public health message, i.e. screen media activity is not simply 'bad for the brain' or 'bad for brain related functioning'."
So I think this is a real interesting paper, but deserves more study and more reporting on what's actually happening, and saying that screen time changes brains (as opposed to, say, kids who want to take their aggression out on something spend more time on the computer) is prematurely attributing causality.
