Excessive use of SNS, up to 2 times lower cognitive function of adolescents
Oct 22, 2025
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The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) research team published the results of a large-scale longitudinal study of 6,554 adolescents aged 9 to 13 in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).
The study was based on data from the 『Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study (ABCD)" involving 21 research centers across the United States. The research team tracked adolescents' social media usage patterns for three years and evaluated various cognitive functions such as language, memory, and processing speed using standardized testing methods from the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
57.6% of the study subjects used very little or very low levels of social media, 36.6% showed low but progressively increasing usage patterns, and 5.8% were divided into addictive use and continuous increase groups.
As a result of the cognitive function test, the group with high and consistently increased social media usage scored the lowest on the language and memory tests. In particular, this group scored 1.5 to 2 times lower on cognitive tests compared to the lower use group.
On the other hand, the group with little or very low usage showed the highest cognitive performance overall.
In addition, the high-intensity use group showed a clear decline in oral reading, sequence memory, and picture vocabulary.
The research team explained that social media is a research result that can adversely affect adolescents' cognitive health beyond simple screen viewing.
In addition, excessive social media use is also associated with mental health problems such as depression, anxiety, and sleep disorders, and these psychological problems can cause cognitive decline, it added.
The research team emphasized that the results support the need to strengthen age restrictions on social media platforms.
However, this study said that the causal relationship cannot be clearly identified as an observational study, and further studies are needed to reveal the effects of specific platforms and cognitive decline mechanisms in the future.
This article was translated by Naver AI translator.
