Due to an unprecedented increase in children's exposure to a wide range of video stimuli, there is a need to understand how they process them. From the tender age of 3, children show distinct activations in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) when presented with children's movies. However, there are multiple factors that can influence child neural response to such screen media, namely, presence of a specific parent, gender differences and emotional valence. Sixty-two preschool children (37 boys) between ages 3 and 4 inclusive and their parents (33 mothers, 29 fathers) were recruited to engage in a joint video attention task involving three 1-min animation video clips that varied in emotional valence (positive, neutral, negative) while the children's neural responses were measured using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). We found a significant interaction effect between emotional valence and gender. Specifically, girls showed significantly more whole-PFC activity than boys when viewing the video clip with positive emotional valence. Children who engaged in joint-viewing with their fathers also showed significantly stronger PFC activity than with their mothers, regardless of the emotional valence of video. Our findings suggest how, at a PFC level, different factors interact with one another and influence the joint-viewing experience of screen time amongst mother-child and father-child dyads. The educational and applied implications of our findings will be discussed below.
Due to an unprecedented increase in children’s exposure to a wide range of video stimuli, there is a need to understand how they process them. From the tender age of 3, children show distinct activations in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) when presented with children’s movies. However, there are multiple factors that can influence child neural response to such screen media, namely, presence of a specific parent, gender differences and emotional valence. Sixty-two preschool children (37 boys) between ages 3 and 4 inclusive and their parents (33 mothers, 29 fathers) were recruited to engage in a joint video attention task involving three 1-min animation video clips that varied in emotional valence (positive, neutral, negative) while the children’s neural responses were measured using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). We found a significant interaction effect between emotional valence and gender. Specifically, girls showed significantly more whole-PFC activity than boys when viewing the video clip with positive emotional valence. Children who engaged in joint-viewing with their fathers also showed significantly stronger PFC activity than with their mothers, regardless of the emotional valence of video. Our findings suggest how, at a PFC level, different factors interact with one another and influence the joint-viewing experience of screen time amongst mother-child and father-child dyads. The educational and applied implications of our findings will be discussed below.
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