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To swipe or not to swipe?—The question in present-day education
Trends in Neuroscience and Education 2 (2013) 95–99
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Trends in Neuroscience and Education journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/tine
From the Editor's Desk
To swipe or not to swipe?—The question in present-day education Manfred Spitzer n University of Ulm, Department of Psychiatry, Leimgrubenweg 12-14, D-89075 Ulm, Germany
art ic l e i nf o Article history: Received 20 August 2013 Accepted 9 September 2013
Even before the advent of tablet-PCs, we sometimes swiped cars and credit cards, for example. Some people made swipes at others or did sweeping swipes, while some coverts swiped items from the store or from their neighbors. The word “to swipe” is derived from “to wipe” which means to pass your hand over a surface – for the purpose of cleaning, drying, or erasing. When the surface is another person's skin, wiping becomes touching or even caressing, and promotes calmness and peace, akin to monkeys removing lice from conspecifics: Cleanliness and social behavior have always been close (cf. [23]). With the advent of the iPhone and the iPad (Fig. 1), swiping became very popular for one single reason: the wiping motion of the hand got a new functional assignment: We turn the page by wiping with one or more fingers over a touch-sensitive screen. Giving the hand's fingers a new function may seem a small beer, nothing but a little techno-cultural oddity and a mere new way to satisfy curiosity by linking an old manual motor output to a new consequence: whatever is displayed on a screen changes. Taken as what it is, this is like 30 years ago, when we learned to press the button of the remote control to change the TV channel. However, the sheer extent1 to which we are using our hand in this new way, makes it no exaggeration to say that swiping has now become a part and parcel of our culturally inherited ways of manual dexterity, like cutting with scissors, writing with a pen, or turning a screw. Cultural progress, one may argue, is regularly accompanied by new ways of using our hands – together with new things and new words. Using our hands as a universal tool may be compared to walking, bicycling, and speaking: We know how to do it because we have learnt it during childhood, and we do not even think of how complicated it really is. If you do not believe me, try teaching a two-legged robot how to walk or – even worse – how to bicycle!
Children pick up these feats easily, but lots of training is clearly involved. And the more training a child gets, the better he/she will perform these tasks – walking, cycling, and speaking – for his/her entire life. Speaking is so complicated that we have not managed to really teach it to computers yet, even though any six year old child can do it fluently. And it is about the same thing with using our hands. Used as a tool, the hand is not just an implement for grabbing but also a sense organ. Whenever we hold something, the hand sends sensations of touch and pressure as well as information about the position of the joints to the brain, where these sensations are combined with what we see, and sometimes hear (as in musicperformances). In this way, “holistic” experiences are produced, telling us the shape, size, motion (both, translational and rotational) of whatever we are handling2. According to the aim of our action (the German word for action being “Handlung”), our brain calculates the resistance we have to overcome to carry out a certain movement, and sends out appropriate motor commands to the muscles. The eyes may be of a bit of a help, but most tasks involving movements are guided by the sensorimotor centers in our brain. In short, the arms of modern robots are tactile-mechanical idiots when compared to the hands of preschool children. There are endless possibilities of grasping and handling an object (Fig. 2), ranging from tip pinch to power grip, pulp-to-pulp pinch, key pinch, hook grip, and spherical pinch grip. Depending on the object and the context and purpose of the action, grip types can be combined with various amounts of pressure and force, speed of motion, and rotation. And all of this has to be learnt by planning the movement, carrying it out, planning it again, doing it better, etc. In addition to these various ways of handling things – from using a hammer to using a violin, from carrying stones to caressing a loved face – there now is the addition of swiping over a featureless surface in order to change the content of a screen. A lot of mothers are
n
Tel.: þ 49 731 500 61400; fax: þ 49 731 500 61402. E-mail address: [email protected] 1 According to a study commissioned by Nokia, the average user of a smartphone looks at it 150 times a day [1]. Since its use is mainly a matter of swiping, this movement therefore must be very frequent. 2211-9493/$ - see front matter & 2013 Published by Elsevier GmbH. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tine.2013.09.002
2 Note that “handling” contains “hand”, even though we often use the word for actions not done by our hands: Soccer players “handle” the ball, and lawyers “handle” a case, well or badly. When we understand something, we come to grips with it. So our language wisely lets the hands do a lot of cognitive functions!
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enthusiastic: “My 2-year-old can use an iPad, he has learnt it all by himself! Is not he a genius?” Parents envisioning the development of Einstein-like mental powers by their toddlers swiping across screens seem to overlook that swiping by no means is a complex mental act. Quite on the contrary, it is one of the dumbest things one can do with the hand. – Enacting mental power? – No! Numbing the mental power of the developing child? – Likely! In what follows, I want to briefly lay out why (Fig. 3). The development of a child's brain depends upon challenging interactions with the world around: With their senses and ideas, hearts and hands, children conquer the world, learn about objects and features, rules and exceptions. Not only is swiping hardly motorically challenging, it also does not make much use of the hand as a sense organ: on a flat featureless surface, there is nothing to sense! Furthermore, given that the motor phenomenon is always almost identical, just as the tactile sensory feedback, there cannot be any holistic experiences of various different things, which in the long run make up our understanding of the world around us.
Fig. 1. In German cities (as pictured here in Berlin) gigantic visuals – five stories high and more than 2.5 times as wide – promote digital swiping devices in the old, analog way (Photo: author).
Furthermore, in addition to “caring parents” and “caring teachers” there are certain aspects of children's experiences that are well known to be of particular importance for child learning: Experiences should be (1) “holistic” and (2) of increasing difficulty. If both conditions are met, children will grow, achieve mental strength, and become capable of handling the world and themselves. Let me explain: (1) Children should not train their hands first, then do a little mental training, then have a little fun and finally have some sensory experiences. Instead, this should all happen at the same time! And this is what I mean with the term “holistic”. In Germany, when using the term “holistic” (“ganzheitlich”), one is in danger to be regarded as hopelessly backward and romantic. But this is just the opposite of what I mean. Studies have shown over and over again, that it is touching ,hearing, seeing and interacting – all at the same time – that are needed by small children to learn. Just seeing or just listening is not enough [14]. And the fun must not come afterwards (and certainly not from a different action or source), but must be an integral part of the experience. Then it will be processed deeply and therefore in the long run produce mental representations of an unlimited amount of interesting people, things, and ideas in the world. (2) In addition to being holistic, developmentally valuable experiences have another feature: their level of difficulty is just right and (which is the same thing) increases over time. Again, studies have demonstrated that it is the incremental difficulty of learning experiences that makes for effective training of sensory, motor, and cognitive skills (cf. [7]). No matter whether a child learns to play soccer or the guitar or to use a paintbrush – he/she will get better and better at it. And realizing this is the biggest reward you can think of it. On the other hand if the level of difficulty stays the same, boredom will set in, and learning will grind to a standstill.
In addition to holistic and ever increasingly difficult experiences, studies have also demonstrated the importance of handling things in order to better think about them [12,13]. Just as about one third of our brain is devoted to vision, another third is devoted
Fig. 2. Ways of grasping: (a) with two fingers (tip pinch) like a forceps/tweezers, e.g. in order to hold a needle; (b) with three fingers to hold a pencil (pulp-to-pulp pinch) or (c) a key (key-pinch); (d) all fingers are used in the spherical pinch grip used to hold an egg, for example; (e) and also in the power grip to hold on to something, (f) and the hook grip to hold a bucket full of water. (Thanks to my 4 year old daughter Anna for her help enacting this hand-photo-shooting).
M. Spitzer / Trends in Neuroscience and Education 2 (2013) 95–99
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Fig. 3. To swipe with the hand over a smooth featureless surface is “child's play” (since the author is not in possession of an iPad, it was simulated with a digital kitchen scale) (a). In toddlers one can observe a kind of confusion, once they have learnt how to swipe an iPad but realize that swiping across other surfaces does not have the same effect (b) still images taken from [6].
to the planning, orchestrating and implementing of movement. Often it is said that humans are visual species. But it is just as often overlooked that humans are motion species, too. Given that most people sit around most of the time, this is understandable, but it gives the wrong impression of the importance of motion for mental activity. Just as we move things around, we move thoughts and ideas around. And we learn to move the latter by learning to move the former. To come to grips with something entails the (motor-) training of the gripping hand (see Fig. 2) as well as the (cognitive) training of concepts. Just as we learn how to speak by talking to one another, we learn how to deal with things and ideas by actively handling them. Note that this amounts to more than either “mere touching” or “mere moving”. It is about active interaction with the world, which helps the child making the world her or his world. Holistic learning will lead to networked thoughts: if you only look at things, you will create only visual representations of things. If you handle things as you look at them, you use – in addition – your motor system to learn them. This leads to connected and thereby mutually strengthening representations in twice as much brain matter. Given that the speed and accuracy of thinking depend upon the neuronal representational space used, it is easy to see then how important handling of objects is to coming to grips with the world! In short, when we talk about learning, we tend to forget about these sensorimotor aspects. But we know that they are crucial both for the development of expert knowledge (cf. [8]) and for the creative use of this knowledge. And this is the problem with the iPad and tablet PCs in general: You swipe your finger(s) over its screen's surface – and that is it. No object-specific sensori-motor cortical areas. Therefore, these layers that are normally used even in high-level thinking, will be of no use to boost thought processes. Hence, the areas that received no specific training become useless brain matter, incapable of adding processing power for high-level cognition. In other words, using the iPad a lot as a child, in the long run, is akin to taking out parts of the kid's brain with comparable debilitating results.
In addition, fine motor control capabilities are not trained, which in turn are the input to higher level spatial cognition. If you have never learnt how to juggle objects around in front of your eye, how will you be able to come up with creative solutions which presuppose mental juggling? It is the interplay between eyes and hands, seeing and grasping, and the many handling-sensations that get integrated into multimodal object representations. Along the same lines, “walking the number line” serves the purpose of number training better than just (disembodied) pointing on a screen [15]. Interacting with an iPad does not support embodied cognition as it provides no object specific sensorimotor input and output. Hence, the use of an iPad by children will, if anything, be detrimental to their cognitive development and by no means facilitate an educational advancement. Despite of this well established understanding of the brain and cognitive development of children, this year's Nuremberg Toy Fair – by far the world's largest toy fair – featured about a dozen iPad like gadgets especially designed for kids of various age and sex (in pink for girls, made of plastics for toddlers). The slogan “Toys 3.0” served to denote a “digital revolution in childrens' rooms”, as many articles in the popular press announced. In the light of what children need in order to develop their brains, the tablet-PC as a toy is just as misguided as its use for learning in elementary schools. We know that textbooks can be read from screens just as well as from paper, but when it comes to digitally enhanced textbooks, with animations and hyperlinks, learning decreases (because of increased distraction), as reported in a paper in the Science magazine [5] which summarizes the evidence available. Along the same line, research by psychologists from Columbia and Harvard University, also published in Science, has shown that information provided by Google, as compared to books, magazines and newspapers, has the least chance to get into long term memory, i.e., to be learnt [19]. Moreover, there is evidence from experimental psychology as well as neuroscience that typing content serves the purpose of
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learning less when compared to handwriting [16–18]. As regards learning to read, writing (but not typing) has been shown to activate the brain-structures involved in reading [10]. In China, teaching third-graders how to type (instead of handwriting Chinese characters) resulted in “the overall incidence rate of severe reading difficulty […] to be much higher than ever reported on Chinese reading” [20]. In previous studies, severe reading difficulties ranged from 2% to 8% in mainland China and Taiwan, whereas in the new study the overall incidence was 42%. The risks and side effects of digital media use in elementary school can hardly be illustrated more strikingly! Nonetheless, many schools in South Korea, The Netherlands, as well as in Germany, are proud to start iPad-classes (in the Netherlands, they are called “Steven Jobs classes”), and in the US, handwriting has been abandoned in 46 States as part of the curriculum of elementary schools, replaced by typing with 10 fingers by the end of fourth grade. In the field of medicine, new therapeutic strategies are introduced only if they have been proven to work better and/or have fewer side effects compared to what is already in use. But when it comes to our children, it seems, we leave decisions to market forces and the PR-agencies of the world's richest companies. Before ruining the brains of the entire next generation with tablet-PCs, we may have a closer look at experiences with animals. Several months ago, iPad applications (“apps”) especially designed to be used by animals have hit the market [9]. Like so many things in life, they were the product of sheer coincidence: The programmers Fuller and Murray had meant to bring out a childrens' game in which mice had to be caught. When it turned out to be a commercial flop, they redesigned the program and published it as a game for cats. Given its low price tag (US$ 1.99) it became an immediate hit and was downloaded over a million times. Meanwhile more applications for cats have been rolled out, one of which, for example, lets cats paint on the iPad with their paws. “I started off really early thinking that it was ridiculous, but it ended up being something really meaningful for people”, the Wall Street Journal quoted application developer Murray, adding that some people printed their cats' paintings, put them on exhibition and even sold them. More than a dozen games for pets can meanwhile be simply downloaded from Apple's online store iTunes, and even though they are developed mainly for cats and dogs, they are also used by penguins, tigers, and frogs. “Penguins especially ‘seem to really love Game for Cats”, Mr. Fuller says, but ‘I do not think that the market is very big’.3 There is competition even from the cat-food producer Friskies who have rolled out seven iPad games for cats, such as Cat Fishing, and Cat Fishing 2, which allows for comparisons between one's own cat's results with the cats of other petlovers via facebook. You vs. Cat, a ball playing game, is even hailed as the world's first Dual Species Game (with cats winning more often than humans, as the statistics from millions of games has shown). In animal shelters, such games are even used for “therapeutic” purposes. Those people responsible for this specific use comment that this may result in the cat assuming ownership and using your iPad all the time. From all this reported activity, one should take note that animals seem not be calmed by these games. Instead, they get addicted (no longer doing anything else but sleeping, feeding, and
3 In case you do not believe this, let me quote the subsequent paragraph from the Wall Street Journal's article: “‘More than a dozen Magellanic penguins periodically play the game at the Aquarium of the Pacific, in Long Beach, Calif.’”, says Dudley Wigdahl, curator of mammals and birds. During their first gaming session in February, he was astonished to see the penguins pecking vigorously at the screen, trying to catch the mouse. ‘They got a lot out of it’, he says. ‘I did not expect that" ([9], p. 31).
playing games), restless, and hyperactive. In fact, playing these games appears to have a frustrating effect on them. Games for dogs also makes the playing animals go crazy using the iPad and by no means results in positive behavioral consequences. These anecdotal observations are in line with the research on mice watching TV for 6 h per day during childhood and adolescence: They become irritable, inattentive, hyperactive, and display learning difficulties [4]. From this, we may conclude that animals do not respond much differently from children to the overuse of screen media. “Dogs do not necessarily do very useful things on the iPad”, dog trainer Anna Jane Grossman is quoted in the Wall Street Journal, and she adds: “But I do not necessarily do very useful things with my iPad either”. So it seems that not only the effects, but also the motivational background for iPad use is not much different in pets and people. And the results of too much time with information technology are frustration, loneliness, depression and cognitive decline – which are exactly the opposite of what current PRcampaigns for the use of information technology in schools want to make us believe! Whatever has effects also has risks and side effects. This medial truism should be carefully considered whenever “innovative reforms” of classrooms and curricula, i.e., of a large part of the mental life of our children is at issue. Before we ruin millions of brains of our children with tablet-PCs in classrooms, we should carefully balance the known risks and side effects with the hoped for educational benefits. There is no single independent study published in a respected peer-reviewed journal showing such benefits. Do we really want to teach two year old toddlers to satisfy their curiosity by swiping? In my view, the available evidence so far calls for caution, as swiping appears to impair, rather than foster, the development of the senses, motor behavior, curiosity, cognition, and creativity. Just as 8–12 year olds should not replace real social interaction with facebook [24], and teens should not stare at their smartphone 150 times a day instead of reaping the benefits of time spent in nature [2,3,11,21,22], toddlers should not swipe, but learn how to use their hands in the old-fashioned way!
References [1] Ahonen T. Average person looks at his phone 150 times per day. Zit. nach, 2013. Available from: 〈http://www.phonearena.com/news/Average-person-look s-at-his-phone-150-times-per-day_id26636〉 [accessed 14.8.2013]. [2] Anonymus. Facebook is bad for you: Get a life! The Economist, 2013a. [accessed 17.8.13]. [3] Anonymus. Why go outside when you have an iPhone? The Economist, 2013b. [accessed 17.8.13]. [4] Christakis DA, Ramirez JSB, Ramirez JM. Overstimulation of newborn mice leads to behavioral differences and deficits in cognitive performance. Scientific Reports 2012;2:546–51. [5] Daniel D, Willingham DT. Electronic textbooks: why the rush? Science 2012:335. [6] De Fons Poel. Brandpunt 23.6.13 (Informationssendung im holländischen Fernsehen, 2013. Available from: 〈http://brandpunt.kro.nl/seizoenen/2013/afle veringen/23-06-2013/fragmenten/het_gewiste_geheugen〉. [7] Diamond A, Lee K. Interventions shown to aid executive function development in children 4 to 12 years old. Science 2011;333:959–64. [8] Hoenig K, Müller C, Herrnberger B, Sim EJ, Spitzer M, Ehret G, et al. Neuroplasticity of semantic representations for musical instruments in professional musicians. Neuroimage 2011;56:1714–25. [9] Hollander S. Pets can‘t keep paws off the iPad. The Wall Street Journal 2013 (13.8.2013), p. 31). [10] James KH, Engelhardt L. The effect of handwriting experience on functional brain development in pre-literate children. Trends in Neuroscience and Education 2012;1:32–42. [11] Kaplan S. The restorative benefits of nature: Toward an integrative framework. Journal of Environmental Psychology 1995;15:169–82. [12] Kiefer M, Sim E-J, Liebich S, Hauk O, Tanaka JW. Experience-dependent plasticity of conceptual representations in human sensory-motor areas. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 2007;19:525–42.
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[13] Kiefer M, Trumpp NM. Embodiment theory and education: the foundations of cognition in perception and action. Trends in Neuroscience and Education 2012;1:15–20. [14] Kuhl PK, Tsao F-M, Liu H-M. Foreign-language experience in infancy: effects of short-term exposure and social interaction on phonetic learning. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 2003;100:9096–101. [15] Link T, Moeller K, Huber S, Fischer U, Nuerk H-C. Walk the number line—an embodied training of numerical concepts. Trends in Neuroscience and Education 2013;2:74–84. [16] Longcamp M, Boucard C, Gilhodes JC, Anton JL, Roth M, Nazarian B, et al. Learning through hand- or typewriting influences visual recognition of new graphic shapes: Behavioral and functional imaging evidence. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 2008;20:802–15. [17] Longcamp M, Hlushchuk Y, Hari R. What differs in visual recognition of handwritten vs. printed letters? An fMRI study Human Brain Mapping 2011;32:1250–9. [18] Longcamp M, Zerbato-Poudou MT, Velay JL. The influence of writing practice on letter recognition in preschool children: A comparison between handwriting and typing. Acta Psychologica 2005;119:67–79.
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[19] Sparrow B, Liu J, Wegner DM. Google effects on memory: cognitive consequences of having information at our Ffngertips. Science 2011;333:776–8. [20] Tan LH, Xu M, Chang CQ, Siok WT. China's language input system in the digital age affects children's reading development. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 2013;111:1119–23. [21] Ulrich RS. View through a window may influence recovery from surgery. Science 1984;224:420–1. [22] Weinstein N, Przybylski AK, Ryan RM. Can nature make us more caring? Effects of Immersion in Nature on Intrinsic Aspirations and Generosity Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 2009;35:1315–29. [23] Zhong CB, Liljenquist K. Washing away your sins: threatened morality and physical cleansing. Science 2006;313:1451–2. [24] Pea R, Nass C, Meheula L, Rance M, Kumar A, Bamford H, et al. Media use, faceto-face communication, media multitasking, and social well-being among 8– 12-year-old girls. Developmental Psychology 2012;48: 327–36.
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Trends in Neuroscience and Education journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/tine
From the Editor's Desk
To swipe or not to swipe?—The question in present-day education Manfred Spitzer n University of Ulm, Department of Psychiatry, Leimgrubenweg 12-14, D-89075 Ulm, Germany
art ic l e i nf o Article history: Received 20 August 2013 Accepted 9 September 2013
Even before the advent of tablet-PCs, we sometimes swiped cars and credit cards, for example. Some people made swipes at others or did sweeping swipes, while some coverts swiped items from the store or from their neighbors. The word “to swipe” is derived from “to wipe” which means to pass your hand over a surface – for the purpose of cleaning, drying, or erasing. When the surface is another person's skin, wiping becomes touching or even caressing, and promotes calmness and peace, akin to monkeys removing lice from conspecifics: Cleanliness and social behavior have always been close (cf. [23]). With the advent of the iPhone and the iPad (Fig. 1), swiping became very popular for one single reason: the wiping motion of the hand got a new functional assignment: We turn the page by wiping with one or more fingers over a touch-sensitive screen. Giving the hand's fingers a new function may seem a small beer, nothing but a little techno-cultural oddity and a mere new way to satisfy curiosity by linking an old manual motor output to a new consequence: whatever is displayed on a screen changes. Taken as what it is, this is like 30 years ago, when we learned to press the button of the remote control to change the TV channel. However, the sheer extent1 to which we are using our hand in this new way, makes it no exaggeration to say that swiping has now become a part and parcel of our culturally inherited ways of manual dexterity, like cutting with scissors, writing with a pen, or turning a screw. Cultural progress, one may argue, is regularly accompanied by new ways of using our hands – together with new things and new words. Using our hands as a universal tool may be compared to walking, bicycling, and speaking: We know how to do it because we have learnt it during childhood, and we do not even think of how complicated it really is. If you do not believe me, try teaching a two-legged robot how to walk or – even worse – how to bicycle!
Children pick up these feats easily, but lots of training is clearly involved. And the more training a child gets, the better he/she will perform these tasks – walking, cycling, and speaking – for his/her entire life. Speaking is so complicated that we have not managed to really teach it to computers yet, even though any six year old child can do it fluently. And it is about the same thing with using our hands. Used as a tool, the hand is not just an implement for grabbing but also a sense organ. Whenever we hold something, the hand sends sensations of touch and pressure as well as information about the position of the joints to the brain, where these sensations are combined with what we see, and sometimes hear (as in musicperformances). In this way, “holistic” experiences are produced, telling us the shape, size, motion (both, translational and rotational) of whatever we are handling2. According to the aim of our action (the German word for action being “Handlung”), our brain calculates the resistance we have to overcome to carry out a certain movement, and sends out appropriate motor commands to the muscles. The eyes may be of a bit of a help, but most tasks involving movements are guided by the sensorimotor centers in our brain. In short, the arms of modern robots are tactile-mechanical idiots when compared to the hands of preschool children. There are endless possibilities of grasping and handling an object (Fig. 2), ranging from tip pinch to power grip, pulp-to-pulp pinch, key pinch, hook grip, and spherical pinch grip. Depending on the object and the context and purpose of the action, grip types can be combined with various amounts of pressure and force, speed of motion, and rotation. And all of this has to be learnt by planning the movement, carrying it out, planning it again, doing it better, etc. In addition to these various ways of handling things – from using a hammer to using a violin, from carrying stones to caressing a loved face – there now is the addition of swiping over a featureless surface in order to change the content of a screen. A lot of mothers are
n
Tel.: þ 49 731 500 61400; fax: þ 49 731 500 61402. E-mail address: [email protected] 1 According to a study commissioned by Nokia, the average user of a smartphone looks at it 150 times a day [1]. Since its use is mainly a matter of swiping, this movement therefore must be very frequent. 2211-9493/$ - see front matter & 2013 Published by Elsevier GmbH. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tine.2013.09.002
2 Note that “handling” contains “hand”, even though we often use the word for actions not done by our hands: Soccer players “handle” the ball, and lawyers “handle” a case, well or badly. When we understand something, we come to grips with it. So our language wisely lets the hands do a lot of cognitive functions!
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enthusiastic: “My 2-year-old can use an iPad, he has learnt it all by himself! Is not he a genius?” Parents envisioning the development of Einstein-like mental powers by their toddlers swiping across screens seem to overlook that swiping by no means is a complex mental act. Quite on the contrary, it is one of the dumbest things one can do with the hand. – Enacting mental power? – No! Numbing the mental power of the developing child? – Likely! In what follows, I want to briefly lay out why (Fig. 3). The development of a child's brain depends upon challenging interactions with the world around: With their senses and ideas, hearts and hands, children conquer the world, learn about objects and features, rules and exceptions. Not only is swiping hardly motorically challenging, it also does not make much use of the hand as a sense organ: on a flat featureless surface, there is nothing to sense! Furthermore, given that the motor phenomenon is always almost identical, just as the tactile sensory feedback, there cannot be any holistic experiences of various different things, which in the long run make up our understanding of the world around us.
Fig. 1. In German cities (as pictured here in Berlin) gigantic visuals – five stories high and more than 2.5 times as wide – promote digital swiping devices in the old, analog way (Photo: author).
Furthermore, in addition to “caring parents” and “caring teachers” there are certain aspects of children's experiences that are well known to be of particular importance for child learning: Experiences should be (1) “holistic” and (2) of increasing difficulty. If both conditions are met, children will grow, achieve mental strength, and become capable of handling the world and themselves. Let me explain: (1) Children should not train their hands first, then do a little mental training, then have a little fun and finally have some sensory experiences. Instead, this should all happen at the same time! And this is what I mean with the term “holistic”. In Germany, when using the term “holistic” (“ganzheitlich”), one is in danger to be regarded as hopelessly backward and romantic. But this is just the opposite of what I mean. Studies have shown over and over again, that it is touching ,hearing, seeing and interacting – all at the same time – that are needed by small children to learn. Just seeing or just listening is not enough [14]. And the fun must not come afterwards (and certainly not from a different action or source), but must be an integral part of the experience. Then it will be processed deeply and therefore in the long run produce mental representations of an unlimited amount of interesting people, things, and ideas in the world. (2) In addition to being holistic, developmentally valuable experiences have another feature: their level of difficulty is just right and (which is the same thing) increases over time. Again, studies have demonstrated that it is the incremental difficulty of learning experiences that makes for effective training of sensory, motor, and cognitive skills (cf. [7]). No matter whether a child learns to play soccer or the guitar or to use a paintbrush – he/she will get better and better at it. And realizing this is the biggest reward you can think of it. On the other hand if the level of difficulty stays the same, boredom will set in, and learning will grind to a standstill.
In addition to holistic and ever increasingly difficult experiences, studies have also demonstrated the importance of handling things in order to better think about them [12,13]. Just as about one third of our brain is devoted to vision, another third is devoted
Fig. 2. Ways of grasping: (a) with two fingers (tip pinch) like a forceps/tweezers, e.g. in order to hold a needle; (b) with three fingers to hold a pencil (pulp-to-pulp pinch) or (c) a key (key-pinch); (d) all fingers are used in the spherical pinch grip used to hold an egg, for example; (e) and also in the power grip to hold on to something, (f) and the hook grip to hold a bucket full of water. (Thanks to my 4 year old daughter Anna for her help enacting this hand-photo-shooting).
M. Spitzer / Trends in Neuroscience and Education 2 (2013) 95–99
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Fig. 3. To swipe with the hand over a smooth featureless surface is “child's play” (since the author is not in possession of an iPad, it was simulated with a digital kitchen scale) (a). In toddlers one can observe a kind of confusion, once they have learnt how to swipe an iPad but realize that swiping across other surfaces does not have the same effect (b) still images taken from [6].
to the planning, orchestrating and implementing of movement. Often it is said that humans are visual species. But it is just as often overlooked that humans are motion species, too. Given that most people sit around most of the time, this is understandable, but it gives the wrong impression of the importance of motion for mental activity. Just as we move things around, we move thoughts and ideas around. And we learn to move the latter by learning to move the former. To come to grips with something entails the (motor-) training of the gripping hand (see Fig. 2) as well as the (cognitive) training of concepts. Just as we learn how to speak by talking to one another, we learn how to deal with things and ideas by actively handling them. Note that this amounts to more than either “mere touching” or “mere moving”. It is about active interaction with the world, which helps the child making the world her or his world. Holistic learning will lead to networked thoughts: if you only look at things, you will create only visual representations of things. If you handle things as you look at them, you use – in addition – your motor system to learn them. This leads to connected and thereby mutually strengthening representations in twice as much brain matter. Given that the speed and accuracy of thinking depend upon the neuronal representational space used, it is easy to see then how important handling of objects is to coming to grips with the world! In short, when we talk about learning, we tend to forget about these sensorimotor aspects. But we know that they are crucial both for the development of expert knowledge (cf. [8]) and for the creative use of this knowledge. And this is the problem with the iPad and tablet PCs in general: You swipe your finger(s) over its screen's surface – and that is it. No object-specific sensori-motor cortical areas. Therefore, these layers that are normally used even in high-level thinking, will be of no use to boost thought processes. Hence, the areas that received no specific training become useless brain matter, incapable of adding processing power for high-level cognition. In other words, using the iPad a lot as a child, in the long run, is akin to taking out parts of the kid's brain with comparable debilitating results.
In addition, fine motor control capabilities are not trained, which in turn are the input to higher level spatial cognition. If you have never learnt how to juggle objects around in front of your eye, how will you be able to come up with creative solutions which presuppose mental juggling? It is the interplay between eyes and hands, seeing and grasping, and the many handling-sensations that get integrated into multimodal object representations. Along the same lines, “walking the number line” serves the purpose of number training better than just (disembodied) pointing on a screen [15]. Interacting with an iPad does not support embodied cognition as it provides no object specific sensorimotor input and output. Hence, the use of an iPad by children will, if anything, be detrimental to their cognitive development and by no means facilitate an educational advancement. Despite of this well established understanding of the brain and cognitive development of children, this year's Nuremberg Toy Fair – by far the world's largest toy fair – featured about a dozen iPad like gadgets especially designed for kids of various age and sex (in pink for girls, made of plastics for toddlers). The slogan “Toys 3.0” served to denote a “digital revolution in childrens' rooms”, as many articles in the popular press announced. In the light of what children need in order to develop their brains, the tablet-PC as a toy is just as misguided as its use for learning in elementary schools. We know that textbooks can be read from screens just as well as from paper, but when it comes to digitally enhanced textbooks, with animations and hyperlinks, learning decreases (because of increased distraction), as reported in a paper in the Science magazine [5] which summarizes the evidence available. Along the same line, research by psychologists from Columbia and Harvard University, also published in Science, has shown that information provided by Google, as compared to books, magazines and newspapers, has the least chance to get into long term memory, i.e., to be learnt [19]. Moreover, there is evidence from experimental psychology as well as neuroscience that typing content serves the purpose of
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learning less when compared to handwriting [16–18]. As regards learning to read, writing (but not typing) has been shown to activate the brain-structures involved in reading [10]. In China, teaching third-graders how to type (instead of handwriting Chinese characters) resulted in “the overall incidence rate of severe reading difficulty […] to be much higher than ever reported on Chinese reading” [20]. In previous studies, severe reading difficulties ranged from 2% to 8% in mainland China and Taiwan, whereas in the new study the overall incidence was 42%. The risks and side effects of digital media use in elementary school can hardly be illustrated more strikingly! Nonetheless, many schools in South Korea, The Netherlands, as well as in Germany, are proud to start iPad-classes (in the Netherlands, they are called “Steven Jobs classes”), and in the US, handwriting has been abandoned in 46 States as part of the curriculum of elementary schools, replaced by typing with 10 fingers by the end of fourth grade. In the field of medicine, new therapeutic strategies are introduced only if they have been proven to work better and/or have fewer side effects compared to what is already in use. But when it comes to our children, it seems, we leave decisions to market forces and the PR-agencies of the world's richest companies. Before ruining the brains of the entire next generation with tablet-PCs, we may have a closer look at experiences with animals. Several months ago, iPad applications (“apps”) especially designed to be used by animals have hit the market [9]. Like so many things in life, they were the product of sheer coincidence: The programmers Fuller and Murray had meant to bring out a childrens' game in which mice had to be caught. When it turned out to be a commercial flop, they redesigned the program and published it as a game for cats. Given its low price tag (US$ 1.99) it became an immediate hit and was downloaded over a million times. Meanwhile more applications for cats have been rolled out, one of which, for example, lets cats paint on the iPad with their paws. “I started off really early thinking that it was ridiculous, but it ended up being something really meaningful for people”, the Wall Street Journal quoted application developer Murray, adding that some people printed their cats' paintings, put them on exhibition and even sold them. More than a dozen games for pets can meanwhile be simply downloaded from Apple's online store iTunes, and even though they are developed mainly for cats and dogs, they are also used by penguins, tigers, and frogs. “Penguins especially ‘seem to really love Game for Cats”, Mr. Fuller says, but ‘I do not think that the market is very big’.3 There is competition even from the cat-food producer Friskies who have rolled out seven iPad games for cats, such as Cat Fishing, and Cat Fishing 2, which allows for comparisons between one's own cat's results with the cats of other petlovers via facebook. You vs. Cat, a ball playing game, is even hailed as the world's first Dual Species Game (with cats winning more often than humans, as the statistics from millions of games has shown). In animal shelters, such games are even used for “therapeutic” purposes. Those people responsible for this specific use comment that this may result in the cat assuming ownership and using your iPad all the time. From all this reported activity, one should take note that animals seem not be calmed by these games. Instead, they get addicted (no longer doing anything else but sleeping, feeding, and
3 In case you do not believe this, let me quote the subsequent paragraph from the Wall Street Journal's article: “‘More than a dozen Magellanic penguins periodically play the game at the Aquarium of the Pacific, in Long Beach, Calif.’”, says Dudley Wigdahl, curator of mammals and birds. During their first gaming session in February, he was astonished to see the penguins pecking vigorously at the screen, trying to catch the mouse. ‘They got a lot out of it’, he says. ‘I did not expect that" ([9], p. 31).
playing games), restless, and hyperactive. In fact, playing these games appears to have a frustrating effect on them. Games for dogs also makes the playing animals go crazy using the iPad and by no means results in positive behavioral consequences. These anecdotal observations are in line with the research on mice watching TV for 6 h per day during childhood and adolescence: They become irritable, inattentive, hyperactive, and display learning difficulties [4]. From this, we may conclude that animals do not respond much differently from children to the overuse of screen media. “Dogs do not necessarily do very useful things on the iPad”, dog trainer Anna Jane Grossman is quoted in the Wall Street Journal, and she adds: “But I do not necessarily do very useful things with my iPad either”. So it seems that not only the effects, but also the motivational background for iPad use is not much different in pets and people. And the results of too much time with information technology are frustration, loneliness, depression and cognitive decline – which are exactly the opposite of what current PRcampaigns for the use of information technology in schools want to make us believe! Whatever has effects also has risks and side effects. This medial truism should be carefully considered whenever “innovative reforms” of classrooms and curricula, i.e., of a large part of the mental life of our children is at issue. Before we ruin millions of brains of our children with tablet-PCs in classrooms, we should carefully balance the known risks and side effects with the hoped for educational benefits. There is no single independent study published in a respected peer-reviewed journal showing such benefits. Do we really want to teach two year old toddlers to satisfy their curiosity by swiping? In my view, the available evidence so far calls for caution, as swiping appears to impair, rather than foster, the development of the senses, motor behavior, curiosity, cognition, and creativity. Just as 8–12 year olds should not replace real social interaction with facebook [24], and teens should not stare at their smartphone 150 times a day instead of reaping the benefits of time spent in nature [2,3,11,21,22], toddlers should not swipe, but learn how to use their hands in the old-fashioned way!
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