User blog comment:Bowl108/Resignation from Disney Prez might keep Phineas and Ferb here longer/@comment-406459-20110917030348/@comment-406459-20110917182343

I've given my opinion on the SpongeBob study at length elsewhere. Briefly, it's an interesting "Step One" as it were to the long-standing question as to whether or not television has a negative effect on children's intelligence. But there's a lot more research that has to be done- whether or not anyone will actually do so is another question entirely. The study involved 60 children, 20 of each doing one of the following for nine minutes: drawing a picture, watching SpongeBob, or watching Caillou. The group who watched SpongeBob performed poorer on mental-based activities such as reciting two numbers back in the opposite order which they were given than the two other groups. Keep in mind that, besides the fact that, as a Nickelodeon representative pointed out, SpongeBob isn't even targeted to a 4-year-old demographic (though there are no doubt 4-year-olds who watch it), the fact that it was a very small sample (20 kids in each group, 60 overall), the limited number of variables in the study (two shows compared with drawing a picture), and the fact that it was only measuring the short-term effects (what happens immediately after watching) as opposed to the long-term effects. More research obviously has to be done, perhaps with a larger sample size and more variables. (To be fair, however, perhaps there is no harm. The study- which was meant to compare fast-paced cartoons to slow-paced ones- made reference to another study which discovered that there was no difference in mental reaction between kids who watched a fast-paced segment of Sesame Street and those who watched a slow-paced one, pointing out the fact that this study was done in 1977 and the pace of Sesame Street- and, I would imagine, most television as a whole- has increased since then.)