Gizmodo: “Keeping your kid’s mind sharp might involve making sure they don’t spend all day on their smartphone or other screen devices, suggests yet more research published this week. Canadian researchers looked at the first bits of data from a 10-year-long U.S. project meant to study how children’s brains develop over time, called the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study (or more cleverly, the ABCD study). As part of the project, funded by the National Institutes of Health, researchers across the U.S. interviewed children and their parents about their lifestyle habits. That included how much time they spent exercising, sleeping, and watching screens on an average day. The children also took questionnaires, provided spit samples, and completed puzzles that measured their cognitive functions. The current study looked at the results from 4,524 children from the ages of 8 to 11 who took part in the ABCD study from September 2016 to 2017. In Canada, as well as the U.S., doctors generally recommend that kids over the age of 6 spend no more than two hours watching screens a day. But only 37 percent of children in the study met this criterion. And these children, the researchers found, were more likely to score better on their cognitive tests. The findings were published in Lancet Child & Adolescent Health…”