Efeitos do uso de mídias eletrônicas e não eletrônicas na atenção de meninos do ensino fundamental

Abstract

The development of world-wide economies and the subsequent improvement of technological infrastructures, coupled with national policies of support and popularization of internet access, and the growing digital literacy of the population, allow us to realize how enormous the expansion of the Communication and Information Technologies (CIT) have been all over the world. Among users of CIT, the children are heading the technological revolution of current times. The scientific community still debates on the effects of the CIT in cognitive development, and the studies which relate cognition and CIT still await expansion, especially in Brazil, which accounts for a small part of the existing studies concerning the field. Due to this fact, the current study aimed to verify the existence of changes in the ability, of 60 boys from 11 to 12 years old, to maintain attention before and after the use of three digital medias: online casual game, social network and fast-paced cartoons, and one non-digital media, comic books, through their performance in the psychometric test d2 and its retest. The data collected were analyzed quantitatively according to the standards stablished for school children of the age range studied. The results indicate there is a performance drop in tasks which require selective attention after the use of the three digital medias researched and of comic books. Despite that, the results which presented statistical relevance on the T Test for paired samples are the ones for the groups: comic books [t(14)=4,08; p=0,001], online casual game [t(14)=3,67; p<0,005] and social network Facebook® [t(14)=4,17; p=0,001]. Through this research we hope to contribute to the improvement of the national literature on the topic, which is currently still scarce, and furthermore to offer theoretical basis for the execution of future research in the field.