Doctor on How Screen Time Hurts Kids' Cognitive Development

C-SPAN0 HN recommenders · 2026–2026
2.9M views · talk · news · Uploaded 2026-01-15

A five-minute C-SPAN clip of Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath testifying to a US Senate committee that screen time, including in schools, harms children's learning and cognitive development.

HN commenters link it as a concise piece of expert testimony in threads on declining test scores and technology in education.

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5 comments from Hacker News

@myth_drannon2026 · in “Gen Z is the first generation less cognitively capable than their parents”

The article is basically a summary of Dr. Cooney Horvath testimony in the US congress and it is linked in the article. He talks about correlation vs causation in this part: [VIDEO] There is plenty of research starting from 60's , introduce technology in the classroom and the learning goes down.

@Herring2026 · in “$30B for laptops yielded a generation less cognitively capable than parents”

Article didn't explain why tech doesn't work in education. It's biological. We evolved to learn from and interact with other humans, preferably the same group over a long time, so we really get to understand/mirror/like/support each other. Anyone who has tried Duolingo gets this. Drop me in China with Chinese friends and I'll learn 100x faster. [VIDEO]

@artur_makly2026 · in “Scores decline again for 13-year-old students in reading and mathematics”

Full Senate Hearing on the Impact of Technology on America's Youth [LINK] Dr's Deposition on How Screen Time Hurts Kids' Cognitive Development [VIDEO]

@mos_basik2026 · in “Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM”

>I don't see how typing it into a computer is significantly different... I haven't read up on it much myself, but any discussion along the lines of this subthread re: "handwriting > typing" is probably discussing research that's starting to be talked about more and more in the past 5 years or so (maybe the pandemic and online learning accelerated interest?) here's a 5m clip of a neuroscientist presenting to the US Senate this year on correlation between dropping academic performance and use of tech in classrooms in many countries over many years, and asking for more research into mechanisms and causation. [VIDEO] and here's a paper from a couple years ago describing differences in observed brain activity between handwriting and typewriting and some discussion of how this could be a mechanism of the kind the video was talking about [LINK] >Is there something stopping you from... No, but I feel like it's not hard to argue that default are important.

@chrismorgan2026 · in “Ask HN: What is your (AI) dev tech stack / workflow? (June 2026)”

The thread has gone from the front page now, so I’ll share my summary of my personal reasons: [LINK] . As regards learning, I haven’t written anything down, and doing it justice would take longer than I am willing to spend now. It’s not exactly the same area, but < [VIDEO] > is five minutes of expert testimony to the U.S. Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee on 2026-01-15 about the resoundingly negative consequences of tech in education. There’s plenty of other well-established research in adjacent areas, things like just how valuable handwriting is for memory retention. It has been established for a long time that struggle is intrinsically valuable for human accomplishment, in areas physical and mental. It’s barely even an extrapolation to say that relying on LLMs will hinder your deep learning (irony indeed). I have no doubt that some will be able to learn better or faster with them, if they use them in disciplined fashion, but even that will be difficult, for they are designed to be addictive, just as social media is. You’ll get going a lot more quickly, but the struggle is not the only thing you’ll lose. Humanly speaking, it truly is alarming what we’re doing to ourselves.