The newly announced ONSET-Mobile study will bring together researchers from the worlds of psychiatry and neuroscience, to explore the impact of smartphone ownership on children and young people.

The Huo Family Foundation has funded the ONSET-Mobile (Offsetting the Naturalistic Start of Engagement with Technology via Mobile Devices to Determine the Causal Impact on Development) study, which will leverage the large variation in the age at which children receive their first smartphone to determine how the resulting increase in digital platform engagement, such as social media and AI, shapes cognitive, emotional, and social development.

Professor Adam Hampshire from the School of Neuroscience, alongside Professor Philip Shaw from the School of Academic Psychiatry, and Director of the King’s Maudsley Partnership, the study will explore whether social media and AI can alter children’s development and impact real world outcomes with both positive and negative implications.

“There is growing concern about how online AI platforms and social media may be shaping the cognitive and social development of children and young people. These concerns are already influencing major policy decisions, yet there remains limited evidence about what the actual effects are, who is most vulnerable, and whether some impacts may even be beneficial.” – Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience

Using Cognitron, an online assessment platform, the team will deliver large-scale (up to 40,000 people) assessments in children from REACT, a unique randomly sampled UK cohort. Then, pseudo-trial modelling will estimate the potential causal pathways where social media and AI use affect cognitive development, mental health, lifestyle and education.

Subsequently, the team will recruit around 800 children and randomise them into two groups. One group will receive a smartphone immediately, and the other will be in the delayed-access arm, where smartphone ownership will be delayed by around six months. This will enable the researchers to develop experimental confirmation of causal effects on cognitive development, mental health and real-world function over 24 months.

“The project tackles a key aspect of the critically important issue of how social media impacts on child development. Many parents ask us, as mental health care professionals, how old their child should be before they get their first smartphone. This study will give the sort of evidence we need to give helpful, informed answers to this important question.” – Professor Philip Shaw, Director of King’s Maudsley Partnership for Children & Young People

The aim of ONSET-Mobile is to help inform parental guidance and national digital health policy around smartphone ownership and use. This will help answer a frequently disputed question, when is the appropriate time for children to be given a smartphone? Alongside this, the study will develop a unique dataset to advance developmental cognitive neuroscience.