Too Cold, Too Hot, Just Right

Or: what a picture book does to a three-year-old’s brain that a cartoon doesn’t

This week’s post is about a study I think everyone with a small child should know about.

A couple of years back a team led by John Hutton put children aged three to five into an MRI scanner and told them three stories. These were all by the same author, each was about five minutes long, but the key to the experiment was that they were delivered in a different way.

One was via audio only with a blank screen. The second was the audio accompanied by still pictures. And the third was a fully animated cartoon. As the kids lay in the machine, the scanner tracked which parts of the brain were firing.

And what Hutton found was pretty cool.

When the story was told through audio only, the language regions of the brain lit up on both sides and had to work really hard. The team read this as a significant strain. They theorised that a three-year-old trying to process a story and having nothing to look at was doing a lot of heavy lifting.

However, when watching the cartoon, they observed the opposite problem. Here, the visual regions of the brain took over from the language centres, because the child’s brain was busy keeping up with the moving pictures. Overall, when watching the cartoon there was “a striking drop in overall connectivity among the brain networks relative to the other formats.”

Finally, when the children had the audio plus the still images, Hutton found that the various brain networks were talking to each other best of all. Language, vision, imagery and reflection were all integrated together and the strain observed with just the audio on the language network was eased. “The pictures provided just enough visual scaffolding to assist the child while still encouraging active imagery and reflection.”

He called this, pretty obviously, the Goldilocks effect. Audio was too cold. Animation was too hot. But the picture book was just right. Sound and still imagery helped the child exactly enough and allowed their brain to do the rest.

I love this study.

However, we mustn’t oversell its findings. It was 27 children in a machine for fifteen minutes. Considering how small-scale it was, we really should try to resist it being used as definitive evidence that screen time hollows out the brains of children, leading to the end of civilisation. A study of preschoolers being read a five-minute story cannot carry that.

And we have some evidence that counters this idea. Salmerón and colleagues followed 654 fourth-graders and 635 fifth-graders in Spain for a year, measuring their reading habits. They then measured their selective attention twelve months later. The results “do not support the claim that screens are loosening students’ attention.” Likewise, Hare and colleagues went through 121 studies from twenty-three years comparing children reading on paper against children reading on screens, and the commonest answer was no real difference.

Now, it might be thought that those two studies seem to contradict Hutton. However, that’s not the case. Animation might well get a three-year-old’s attention, but it doesn’t get their brain working. Engagement and integration are very different things. The whole screens-versus-books argument has wasted an awful lot of time confusing one for another.

The thing is, the Goldilocks study was never about finding that screens were bad. It was showing how much help a small brain needs to interpret information.

I think this is a good moment to quote Maryanne Wolf’s line that human beings were never born to read, and that the circuit for it has to be built in every child from scratch.

And that, for me, is what Hutton’s work shows best. He was very clear to say that the ideal would be an adult reading to a child and then talking to them about the nature of the story as they went along.

Sources:

John S. Hutton and others, ‘Differences in Functional Brain Network Connectivity during Stories Presented in Audio, Illustrated, and Animated Format in Preschool-Age Children’, Brain Imaging and Behavior, 14.1 (2020), 130-41.

Ladislao Salmerón, Lidia Altamura, Mari Carmen Blanco-Gandía and others, ‘Did Screen Reading Steal Children’s Focus? Longitudinal Associations between Reading Habits, Selective Attention and Text Comprehension’, Journal of Research in Reading, 48.2 (2025), 175-98.

Carolynn Hare, Ben Johnson, Megan Vlahiotis and others, ‘Children’s Reading Outcomes in Digital and Print Mediums: A Systematic Review’, Journal of Research in Reading, 47.3 (2024), 309-329.

Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World (New York: Harper, 2018).