Why Does Fantasy in Screen Media Deplete Childrenʼs Executive Function?

ABSTRACT

In response to Hinten et al.'s (2025) meta‐analysis of the impact of fantasy and fast pacing in screen media on young children, I present an information processing model in effort to explain the fantasy effect. Drawing on important work by Lang, I discuss how media might be processed, and why fantasy events could be particularly problematic. In essence, they may overload the cognitive system, which is trying to make sense of impossible events without the benefit of existing schemas that would reduce cognitive load.

Summary

We need better theory to guide research on why fantasy impairs executive function. Some ideas are provided here.

1. Introduction

Lillard and Peterson (2011) and several others have found that children who watched a fast‐paced fantasy show scored lower on executive function (EF tasks) immediately after. Hinten et al.' s (2025) meta‐analysis substantiates that fantasy, not pace, explains these findings (see Lillard et al. 2015). They conjecture that pace is not detrimental because children get used to seeing fast‐paced screen media from a young age; their explanation for why fantasy is disruptive is less clear. A model of why fantasy media lowers EF, and subsequent tests of that model, should shed light both on understand fantasy media processing and on children's EF itself. For example, Hinten et al. particularly found inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility tasks to be impaired by fantasy screen media. And yet, EF factors are not usually separable in young children; single‐factor solutions are more common. One recent analysis found a single EF factor, and an attention factor (Deodhar and Bertenthal 2023). So what does it mean that the meta‐analysis found only two factors were impaired, not working memory? Support for a model of media processing that privileges cognitive flexibility without invoking working memory might support pulling apart those subcomponents and shed light on both EF and media processing in young children.

The model proposed in Figure 1 applies information processing theory (Lang 2000; Lee and Lang 2013), incorporating models of attention (Petersen and Posner 2012) and EF (Diamond 2013) to consider what might happen when children watch these media. Fantastical screen media may impair subsequent EF because viewing the shows and performing the EF tasks draws on the same limited information processing resources. Walking through the model, one attends to media, due to both top‐down and especially bottom‐up processes—with screen media like SpongeBob, bottom‐up processes predominate. Visual and auditory sensory receptors register and store images and sounds briefly. (It may be worth noting that fantastical content seems to be portrayed mainly visually; Hinten et al. noted that working memory was not impaired, and perhaps this is because auditory working memory tasks [e.g., digit span] are so commonly used; a visual‐spatial task like Corsi Block might show more evidence of deficit.) Select information from the sensory store is encoded, then passed to working memory for processing. All this occurs dynamically since screen media continuously present new messages (Lang 2000). The viewer cannot control that pace (more like being read to than reading). It is interesting that pace does not matter at all for subsequent EF—this suggests that the problem, may not be in the sensory store and encoding phases, which would likely be impacted by pace.

FIGURE 1.

A model for why fantastical television content impairs children's EF.

However, encoding is compromised when message complexity exceeds information processing capacity (Lang et al. 1999; Lang et al. 2013). For example, when a cut is followed by unrelated information, the new information is poorly encoded (Lang et al. 1993). In fantasy media, new information is often unrelated—it does not fit into our schemas. Processing the narrative involves storing and retrieving events in order to make sense of incoming information. Top‐down attention is used here as well. When processing becomes overly challenging (because the information is too difficult), the information is not encoded (Lang et al. 2013). This is testable: how well do children encode fantastical versus realistic screen media? Fantastical events are complex because we lack schemas to interpret them, and we must therefore integrate information from multiple unrelated schemas in order to interpret them. This uses cognitive resources. If children observe the same fantasy media event repeatedly, do they form a schema of the event?

Perhaps watching fantasy events taxes inhibitory control because one has to inhibit what should happen—events that normally occur in the real world—to allow for what actually does happen. For example, it should be that when a character pours cat food from a box, a certain amount (no more than what the box can hold) comes out and that's it. But in a fantasy cartoon, it can keep coming out until there is a pile 100 times greater than the size of the box! This strains credulity and we may have to inhibit our rejection of this impossibility in order to keep making sense of the narrative. Inhibition is also, of course, used in cognitive flexibility tasks.

In sum, after a child has been watching fantasy media, their attentional resources are strained from trying to make sense of the fantastical events, and EF is strained from inhibiting reality while keeping in mind and making sense of narratives that make no sense in the real world, that cannot happen. Repeatedly experiencing fantasy‐infused shows early in development could impair the development of processing networks, resulting in long term EF problems. But even short‐term impacts, as were assessed in the experiments Hinten et al. reviewed, are important because children do not function well when their EF processes are depleted. This might be exacerbated when many fantasy events are presented in quick succession, although Lillard et al. (2015) found that slow and fantastical media were as detrimental to later EF as fast and fantastical media were.

Finally, it may be that very limited fantasy (two events) might enhance attention in screen media, as it does with static book media (Hopkins and Lillard 2021; Hopkins and Weisberg 2021). Perhaps watching limited amounts of fantasy would increase one's capacity to process it; or alternatively, perhaps it would simply create a less well‐tuned brain, since fantasy events do not occur in the real world, and are typically one‐offs in screen media. I've never seen the cat‐food box incident again in my life, since watching it on an episode of SpongeBob. Increasing knowledge of what kinds of screen media cause EF depletion and why will inform optimal media diets for children.

Funding

While writing this manuscript, AL was supported in part by grant 23‐10339 from Arnold Ventures.

Conflicts of Interest

The author has no conflict of interest.

Data Availability Statement

The author has nothing to report.