Report on the effects of ICT use on attention related cognitive functions measured with ESM and fMRI. Focus on ESM and fMRI methods to measure effects of ICT skills and use on wellbeing and cognitive functions

This report presents methodologies that are developed and implemented in two studies investigating how information and communications technology (ICT) skills and use are associated with (1) adolescents’ wellbeing on momentary and daily levels, as measured with experience sampling method (ESM), and (2) cognitive skills and related brain activity, as measured with cognitive tasks and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Both studies are conducted in two countries: Finland and Belgium.

In the ESM study, two waves of intensive longitudinal data are collected from both countries, first in the start of the academic year and second two months later. The participants are 13- to 17-year-old adolescents who respond to six daily surveys with a momentary assessment app on their phones during a 14-day period in each wave. The questionnaires are designed to capture adolescents’ daily ICT use (e.g., momentary ICT use and daily screen time) and aspects of their wellbeing, including emotions, self-efficacy, problematic social media use and sleep. Using ecologically valid momentary ESM assessments reduces recall bias and allows examining within-person effects and temporal processes underlying the links between ICT use and wellbeing.

In the fMRI study, the participants are 12- to 14-year-olds. They perform mathematical tasks during scanning of their brain activity with fMRI. In half of the conditions, their performance is distracted with task-irrelevant speech and babble mimicking classroom voices. The aim of this fMRI study is to determine whether ICT skills and use, measured with the ySKILLS questionnaire (see Appendix 1), are associated with performance and brain activity in these attention-demanding conditions. A preceding fMRI data collection in young adult participants has already indicated that the applied experimental settings are able to reveal modulations of brain activity related to mathematical task performance, control of attention, and distraction of task performance by task-irrelevant speech. The fMRI and behavioural results from 12- to 14-year-olds will be also compared with those obtained during semantic processing of written sentences at the presence or absence of distracting speech, and during semantic processing of spoken sentences at the presence or absence of distracting written text. Previous studies in adults and adolescents have shown that also these experimental settings efficiently reveal task-, attention-, and distraction-related changes in brain activity.