There’s lots of evidence that most TV isn’t beneficial to toddlers, and it may even be harmful. But can’t kids learn from TV too? Isn’t that supposed to be what shows like Teletubbies, Barney, and Sesame street are all about? For older children, three and above, it does seem to be true that some learning can occur, but for two-year-olds and younger, the evidence tells a different story.
Few studies have shown any evidence that two-year-olds can learn from TV anywhere near as well as they learn from real-world experiences. While they clearly can distinguish between nonsense programming and real shows, they don’t do much at all with the information presented in the shows. One study found they can’t imitate actions shown on TV as well as live actions, and another showed they don’t learn labels for objects from TV shows.
Perhaps most intriguing are two studies, one by G.L. Troseth and J.S. DeLoache, and another by K.L. Schmitt and Daniel Anderson. In these experiments, two-year-olds were shown videos of experimenters hiding objects in a room. Then the toddlers were allowed into the room and told to find the object. Accuracy ranged from 44 percent to 25 percent, despite the fact that there were only from four to six possible hiding places in the room. Their performance was no better than if they had simply searched the room at random, with no video to help them.
Many toddlers did seem to look in the right spot after watching the first video, but if the task was repeated with a different hiding place, they simply returned to the original spot, ignoring the new video evidence.
Do toddlers just have difficulty translating from a small screen to full-sized reality? When Jim and Nora were toddlers, they loved Barney the Dinosaur, but cowered in fear when they saw a life-sized human in a Barney suit. Or maybe toddlers struggle with converting a two-dimensional television image into a three-dimensional physical space. Or perhaps they believe that the things on the TV inhabit their own tiny world inside the box, unrelated to the larger, outside world.
Marie Evans Shmidt, Alisha Crawley-Davis, and Anderson developed a new experiment that promised to answer some of these questions by simplifying the problem. Instead of hiding objects in a room, they hid stickers behind larger objects on a felt board. The felt board was the same size as a TV screen that the toddlers watched. Some of the two-year-olds watched an experimenter hide the objects on TV. Some of them watched the objects as they hidden on the actual felt board. And some them saw objects being hidden on a sample felt board. In each case they had to locate the objects on the original felt board. This graph shows the results:
As you can see, the toddlers who watched the objects being hidden on the actual felt board did significantly better than the others. In this experiment, there were only four hiding places, so a 25 percent accuracy rate is equivalent to chance performance. As in the earlier studies, toddlers who watched on TV were significantly better on their first attempt compared to later attempts to find the object, while there was no significant difference in the other conditions. Not only does watching TV help very little, but performance gets worse over time!
In a second experiment, the researcher hid a stuffed toy Snoopy in a separate room from the toddler, then either told the child where the toy was hidden in person, or on TV, before letting him or her into the room to search for the toy. Again, there were four possible hiding places. Here are the results:
Once again, being told in person resulted in significantly better performance. As before, the TV-watchers got worse over time. Clearly the toddlers can understand the verbal descriptions of the objects, but somehow they don’t get the message on TV.
Schmidt’s team says that these experiments show that toddlers don’t have true mental representations of scenes. Instead, they rely on direct experience — their own interactions with the felt board or the room with the hidden Snoopy doll. The reason they do somewhat better on the first TV-watching trial is that they form a “fragile memory” of the hidden object. When this is confirmed by experience, most toddlers assume the object is always going to be located in the same place, regardless of whether they see it hidden someplace else on TV later.
So while toddlers can understand what’s going on on TV, they don’t think about what they see on TV the same way older kids and adults do. They don’t connect it back to the real things they encounter in their world, so they can’t learn from TV. Whatever it is your toddler gets from watching TV, these researchers say, it’s not learning.
Schmidt, M.E., Crawley-Davis, A.M., Anderson, D.R. (2007). Two-year-olds’ object retrieval based on television: Testing a perceptual account Media Psychology, 9 (2), 389-409