Is SpongeBob SquarePants Rotting Your Kid's Brain?

Maybe, according to a new study, that found kids perform poorly at certain tasks after watching fast-paced cartoons:

Lillard and Peterson randomly assigned 60 4-year-olds to three groups: one that watched nine minutes of a fast-paced, "very popular fantastical cartoon about an animated sponge that lives under the sea;" one that watched nine minutes of slower-paced programming from a PBS show "about a typical U.S. preschool-aged boy;" and a third group that was asked to draw for nine minutes with markers and crayons.

Immediately after their viewing and drawing tasks were complete, the kids were asked to perform four tests to assess executive function. Unfortunately for the denizens of Bikini Bottom, the kids who watched nine minutes of the frenetic high jinks of the "animated sponge" scored significantly worse than the other kids.

Link

Previously on Neatorama: 10 Neat Facts About SpongeBob SquarePants


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you know what this study proves? That people engaged in intensive activities, even vicariously, take a little more time to shift mental modes than those people who were engaged in less demanding activities.

If I code for 4 hours, and "immediately after" my girlfriend asks me what I want to eat ... I usually just babble gibberish. My brain is in another place.
Have I been stupefied by coding, or is it that I need a little time to change my mode?

I'd suggest that common sense says it is the latter.
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It may affect some kids, but my younger Grandson loves SBSP and he is as sharp as a tack. As a former teacher I know one thing. I had to plan my lessons in short chunks of time and information to keep the attention of what I called the "Sesame Street Generation" of students.
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What a bunch of nonsense. I hope my tax dollars did not pay for this study. Why are they picking on a particular show? What sparked the hypothesis? 10 years ago they were saying the same thing about Pokemon.
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