Children aged between 10 and 14 years with significant exposure to social media experience a gradual decline in their ability to concentrate, neuroscientists cautioned on Monday, announcing new research findings.

Their study, based on tracking over 8,300 children, has found that sustained above-average use of platforms such as Instagram, Facebook or Snapchat, among others, appeared to lead to symptoms of inattention. They have found no such association with watching television or playing video games.

“Much of the focus has been on children’s total screen time,” Torkel Klingberg, professor of cognitive neuroscience at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, who led the study, told The Telegraph. “We find that how they’re using screen time is important. Social media appears to have this effect that we don’t see with TV or video games.”

The researchers have observed a dose-response pattern — the more time that children spent on social media each day, the higher their inattention scores crept upwards, adding to a cumulative rise of 0.15 units among heavier users over the four-year study period.

“Although this effect size is small at an individual level, it could have significant consequences if behaviour changes occur at the population level,” the researchers said in their study published on Monday in Paediatrics Open Science.

The findings come two days before Australia is set to implement a world-first social media ban for under-16s, blocking access to several platforms for more than a million young users, Reuters reported.

Given the widespread use of social media among children, the researchers said stricter age regulations were needed to curb usage and support healthy development.

Klingberg and his colleagues tracked 8,324 children from diverse ethnic backgrounds, including White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, Native American and Pacific Islander kids. On average, children spent 84 minutes per day on social media, 90 minutes playing video games and 138 minutes watching television or videos.

The association between social media use and inattention was not influenced by socioeconomic background or genetic predisposition towards ADHD. Children who already had symptoms of inattention did not increase their social media use, suggesting that social media contributes to the emergence of symptoms rather than the reverse.

Earlier research had offered mixed evidence on whether social media raises the risk of attention-related disorders, in part because most studies did not account for children’s genetic predisposition.

A 2021 review of 50 studies from 19 states in India had estimated that 20 to 40 per cent of college students were at risk of Internet addiction. A smaller survey of adolescents in Tamil Nadu in 2024 had found that about a quarter use social media for more than two hours a day.

The researchers emphasised that their findings do not mean all children who use social media will develop concentration difficulties.

Although the precise neural mechanisms remain unclear, social media platforms often involve constant messaging and notifications that can disrupt attention. Previous research on multitasking has shown that such interruptions, even the mere presence of an unused phone nearby, can impair attention and learning.

By contrast, playing video games requires sustained focus and has been linked to improvements in cognitive function.

“Social media involves constant distractions, and even the thought of whether a message has arrived can act as a mental distraction,” Klingberg said in a Karolinska Institute media release. “This affects the ability to stay focused and could explain the association.”

For any one child, the increase in inattention is small and unlikely to cause noticeable symptoms. But across a population, even this modest rise could push more children over the threshold for ADHD, potentially increasing diagnoses from roughly 5 to 11 per cent to 7 to 14 per cent.

The researchers found no increase in hyperactive or impulsive behaviour. “Greater consumption of social media might explain part of the rise we’re seeing in ADHD diagnoses, even though hyperactivity didn’t increase in our study,” Klingberg added.