Study: Too many video games may sap attention span

Parents who believe that playing video games is less harmful to their kids' attention spans than watching TV may want to reconsider -- and unplug the Xbox. Video games can sap a child's attention just as much as the tube, a new study suggests.
Elementary school children who play video games more than two hours a day are 67 percent more likely than their peers who play less to have greater-than-average attention problems, according to the study, which appears in the journal Pediatrics.
Playing video games and watching TV appear to have roughly the same link to attention problems, even though video games are considered a less passive activity, the researchers say.
"Video games aren't less likely than television to be related to attention problems," says the lead author of the study, Edward Swing, a doctoral candidate in the department of psychology at Iowa State University, in Ames. "They were at least as strong as television at predicting attention problems."
However, the study doesn't prove that video games directly cause attention problems. It could be that kids who have short attention spans to begin with might be more likely to pick up a joystick than a book, for instance.
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The relationship between video games and attention is probably a two-way street, Swing says. "It wouldn't surprise me if children who have attention problems are attracted to these media, and that these media increase the attention problems," he says.
Swing and his colleagues followed more than 1,300 children in the third, fourth, and fifth grades for a little over a year. The researchers asked both the kids and their parents to estimate how many hours per week the kids spent watching TV and playing video games, and they assessed the children's attention spans by surveying their schoolteachers.
Previous studies have examined the effect of TV or video games on attention problems, but not both. By looking at video-game use as well as TV watching, Swing and his colleagues were able to show for the first time that the two activities have a similar relationship to attention problems.
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C. Shawn Green, Ph.D, a postdoctoral associate in the department of psychology at the University of Minnesota, in Minneapolis, points out that the study doesn't distinguish between the type of attention required to excel at a video game and that required to excel in school.
"A child who is capable of playing a video game for hours on end obviously does not have a global problem with paying attention," says Green, who has researched video games but was not involved in the current study. "The question, then, is why are they able to pay attention to a game but not in school? What expectancies have the games set up that aren't being delivered in a school setting?"
Experts have suggested that modern TV shows are so exciting and fast paced that they make reading and schoolwork seem dull by comparison, and the same may be true for video games, the study notes.
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It's unclear from this study whether that's the case, however, because Swing and his colleagues didn't look at the specific games the kids were playing.
"We weren't able to break [the games] down by educational versus non-educational or nonviolent versus violent," says Swing, adding that the impact different types of games may have on attention is a ripe area for future research.
The study also suggests that young kids aren't the only ones whose attention spans may be affected by video games.
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In addition to surveying the elementary school kids, the researchers asked 210 college students about their TV and video-game use and how they felt it affected their attention. The students who logged more than two hours of TV and video games a day were about twice as likely to have attention problems, the researchers found.
These attention problems later in life may be the result of "something cumulative that builds up over a lifetime" or "something that happens early in life at some critical period and then stays with you," Swing says. "Either way, there are implications that would lead us to want to reduce television and video games in childhood."
The American Academy of Pediatrics, the leading professional organization for pediatricians and the publisher of Pediatrics, recommends that parents limit all "screen time" (including video and computer games) to less than two hours per day.
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For his part, Green says that how much time kids spend playing video games should be a matter of common sense and parental judgment.

"A hard boundary, such as two hours, is completely arbitrary," he says. "Children are individuals, and what makes sense for one won't necessarily work for another."

Source:CNN

Bill would give president emergency control of Internet

Internet companies and civil liberties groups were alarmed this spring when a U.S. Senate bill proposed handing the White House the power to disconnect private-sector computers from the Internet.

They're not much happier about a revised version that aides to Sen. Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, have spent months drafting behind closed doors. CNET News has obtained a copy of the 55-page draft of S.773 (excerpt), which still appears to permit the president to seize temporary control of private-sector networks during a so-called cybersecurity emergency.

The new version would allow the president to "declare a cybersecurity emergency" relating to "non-governmental" computer networks and do what's necessary to respond to the threat. Other sections of the proposal include a federal certification program for "cybersecurity professionals," and a requirement that certain computer systems and networks in the private sector be managed by people who have been awarded that license.

"I think the redraft, while improved, remains troubling due to its vagueness," said Larry Clinton, president of the Internet Security Alliance, which counts representatives of Verizon, Verisign, Nortel, and Carnegie Mellon University on its board. "It is unclear what authority Sen. Rockefeller thinks is necessary over the private sector. Unless this is clarified, we cannot properly analyze, let alone support the bill."

Representatives of other large Internet and telecommunications companies expressed concerns about the bill in a teleconference with Rockefeller's aides this week, but were not immediately available for interviews on Thursday.

A spokesman for Rockefeller also declined to comment on the record Thursday, saying that many people were unavailable because of the summer recess. A Senate source familiar with the bill compared the president's power to take control of portions of the Internet to what President Bush did when grounding all aircraft on Sept. 11, 2001. The source said that one primary concern was the electrical grid, and what would happen if it were attacked from a broadband connection.

When Rockefeller, the chairman of the Senate Commerce committee, and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) introduced the original bill in April, they claimed it was vital to protect national cybersecurity. "We must protect our critical infrastructure at all costs--from our water to our electricity, to banking, traffic lights and electronic health records," Rockefeller said.

The Rockefeller proposal plays out against a broader concern in Washington, D.C., about the government's role in cybersecurity. In May, President Obama acknowledged that the government is "not as prepared" as it should be to respond to disruptions and announced that a new cybersecurity coordinator position would be created inside the White House staff. Three months later, that post remains empty, one top cybersecurity aide has quit, and some wags have begun to wonder why a government that receives failing marks on cybersecurity should be trusted to instruct the private sector what to do.

Rockefeller's revised legislation seeks to reshuffle the way the federal government addresses the topic. It requires a "cybersecurity workforce plan" from every federal agency, a "dashboard" pilot project, measurements of hiring effectiveness, and the implementation of a "comprehensive national cybersecurity strategy" in six months--even though its mandatory legal review will take a year to complete.

The privacy implications of sweeping changes implemented before the legal review is finished worry Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. "As soon as you're saying that the federal government is going to be exercising this kind of power over private networks, it's going to be a really big issue," he says.

Probably the most controversial language begins in Section 201, which permits the president to "direct the national response to the cyber threat" if necessary for "the national defense and security." The White House is supposed to engage in "periodic mapping" of private networks deemed to be critical, and those companies "shall share" requested information with the federal government. ("Cyber" is defined as anything having to do with the Internet, telecommunications, computers, or computer networks.)

"The language has changed but it doesn't contain any real additional limits," EFF's Tien says. "It simply switches the more direct and obvious language they had originally to the more ambiguous (version)...The designation of what is a critical infrastructure system or network as far as I can tell has no specific process. There's no provision for any administrative process or review. That's where the problems seem to start. And then you have the amorphous powers that go along with it."

Translation: If your company is deemed "critical," a new set of regulations kick in involving who you can hire, what information you must disclose, and when the government would exercise control over your computers or network.

The Internet Security Alliance's Clinton adds that his group is "supportive of increased federal involvement to enhance cyber security, but we believe that the wrong approach, as embodied in this bill as introduced, will be counterproductive both from an national economic and national secuity perspective.

Source: cnet