Early infant affinity toward screens

With near-ubiquitous adoption of screen media among U.S. families, the average age of screen media exposure is becoming increasingly younger. Most infants are exposed to screen media by 4 months of age and 75-96% of infants are using screen media daily. The scale of screen media adoption underscores a pressing public health need to characterize infant screen media exposures, predictors, and effects. Despite decades of research highlighting the importance of the infants’ role in shaping caregiving behaviors, the contribution of infant characteristics to screen media exposures is greatly under-explored. Indeed, the National Academies of Science has highlighted that more attention needs to be paid to individual differences to screen media effects, given that not all children experience adverse impacts from screen media. Prior work has identified that infants likely have individual differences in their affective and behavioral response to screen media. However, only infant temperament has been explored as a predictor of screen media outcomes. Drawing from a parallel literature of obesity, detailed observational assessments of infant regulatory behaviors in eating contexts are stronger predictors of obesity than temperament alone. More rigorous and nuanced assessment of infants’ attentional, affective, and regulatory responses to screen media is urgently needed to move the science forward. This assessment would create a corpus of observable infant symptoms that predict individual differences to screen media. Therefore, this proposal seeks to test a novel paradigm characterizing infants’ behaviors during screen viewing, to be termed infant affinity toward screens. Specifically, this project will measure an infant’s attraction to screens, changes in visual attention, body movement, affect, and calming when viewing screen-based videos, in addition to negative affect during the transition away from screen media. The study will leverage a diverse existing cohort of infants in a longitudinal study (K23 HD105988) to test these predictors of infant affinity toward screens. This project will also test prospective associations with maladaptive screen media behaviors to identify at-risk infants. Among 100 mother-infant dyads, the aims are to: 1) characterize infant affinity toward screens in a behavioral task at 9 months of age; 2) identify infant temperamental and maternal predictors of infant affinity toward screens; 3) test prospective associations between infant affinity toward screens at 9 months of age and maladaptive screen behaviors at 12 months of age. This proposal will identify clinically relevant infant behaviors that shape screen media outcomes, salient aspects of an infant’s early environment that contribute to infant affinity toward screens, and potential targets for intervention to prevent maladaptive outcomes. In future work, this paradigm could be applied to scale in pediatric clinics, home visitation programs, and parent-child interventions. In summary, careful behavioral phenotyping of infant affinity toward screens has high translational impact to identify at-risk infants and precisely inform future interventions that shape healthy trajectories of screen media use. Project Number: 1R21HD117004-01A1 | Fiscal Year: 2025 | NIH Institute/Center: Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) | Principal Investigator: Tiffany Munzer | Institution: UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN AT ANN ARBOR, ANN ARBOR, MI | Award Amount: $429,000 | Activity Code: R21 | Study Section: Psychosocial Development, Risk and Prevention Study Section[PDRP] View on NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/1R21HD11700401A1