[From Mashable, where the story includes more images and two videos]

Are Interactive Toys Interfering With Child Development?

By Travis Andrews
Feb 25, 2014

It’s common to find a child talking to his Lego figures or Barbie dolls, but it’d probably knock your socks off if those toys talked back.

Well, find some tighter footwear, because interactive toys are popping up faster than you can say “Polly Pocket.” The Winston Show, for example, is an interactive program for iOS in which the characters hold detailed conversations with the viewers. FooPets are the digital, veterinarian-created “world’s most realistic virtual pets” and Motobo turns an iPhone into a chatty buddy. But are they beneficial or detrimental?

For a new generation of children, these types of interactive ventures could be the future of toys. While that might trigger a Matrix-focused panic, there’s a more immediate concern: Since it’s been difficult to study lasting effects of such a new toy trend, no one knows exactly how this could affect children’s development — for better, for worse or for naught.

We spoke to interactive toymakers and child development experts to get their take on how digital playtime might affect young kids.

The Winston Show

Oren Jacob worked with Pixar for more than 20 years before he left his role as CTO. Shortly thereafter, he and fellow Pixar vet Martin Reddy founded ToyTalk, a company that “creates conversation-driven entertainment for families,” according to its website. The company currently has one offering: The Winston Show, which is the first cartoon in the genre’s history to not just talk to its audience, but also listen to it.

Jacob describes the show as the “interesting and complicated intersection between technology and entertainment.” At its most basic level, it’s a TV show that allows the viewer to interact with it by speaking to the characters. The characters then respond specifically to what is said and attempt to move the conversation forward.

Jacob says the goal is have the viewer — generally between five and 10 years old — and characters split their interactions evenly.

“We hope that the experience is legitimately half the child’s and half ours,” Jacob says, “and that Winston and [the child] are playing together and talking back and forth to each other.”

It’s part-show, part-trivia game and part-conversational companion that’s made to interact — not in the stilted, one-sided manner of Siri, but as a real person.

“As an internal goal for ourselves, we are most pleased when Winston changes the conversation from leading to following and back to leading, and that happens smoothly,” Jacob says.

And kids seem to accept it pretty quickly. The average user spends 30 minutes a week on the show, and the interactive technology doesn’t seem to faze them. In early (pre-Siri) beta versions of The Winston Show, it took “five, six, seven minutes…to get your average [child] to understand what’s going on,” Jacob says. “But in the past 12 [post-Siri] months, it’s taken seconds.”

FooPets

Kids aren’t only bonding with garrulous cartoon characters. While earlier generations had Tamagotchi pets, today’s youngsters have FooPets, “the world’s most realistic virtual puppies and kittens,” according to its website — digitally programmed (and extremely cute) animals.

Created by veterinarian Dr. Ron Hornbarker, FooPets allows users to “adopt” dogs and cats for approximately $5 per month. Then they can take on all the normal responsibilities of pet ownership, such as feeding and exercising. If users leave their pets “alone” for too many days, they can lose their “Bondage Badge.”

Users certainly bond with their pets — in fact, some have had their online critters since the site was founded in 2008. It’s that type of bonding that prompted Hornbarker to create the site in the first place.

“As a former veterinarian, I had experienced the human-animal bond firsthand over the several years I owned a small-animal hospital,” Hornbarker says. “My goal with FooPets was to try to recreate that emotional bond online with hyper-realistic pets and real care schedules.”

He calls them “warm-up pets” for children, and pointed out that some of the site’s more allergenic “members love pets, but cannot have a real pet at home due to their life circumstances, and so a FooPet is the closest possible substitute pet.”

The Effect on Children

The Winston Show and FooPets are aimed at children in early stages of development. While theories abound as to how interactive toys could affect children, there simply isn’t much hard research on the subject.

However, Jacob says The Winston Show can spur language development, and that’s a selling point to parents. Since children discovering language like to talk a lot, the show offers a place for them to have in-depth conversations about anything that comes to mind — even ice cream flavor preferences.

“To express oneself vocally and have a play partner who will talk back and not get tired of it is pretty appealing,” he says. “That’s when you learn to speak.”

Lauren Sherman, a graduate student researcher, agrees that such toys can help, to a certain extent. Sherman works with the Children’s Digital Media Center @ Los Angeles (CDMC@LA), a collaborative between UCLA and Cal State L.A. focusing on the effects of digital media on the offline lives and long-term development of children and teens.

“The Winston Show…may have greater potential to teach children communication skills than a classic television show featuring the same character and content,” Sherman says.

She cites a study in which infants were found to develop “the ability to distinguish between different sounds…at both a behavioral and neural level” in a language when they heard a native speaker talk in that language in-person. Another set of infants heard similar monologues from television; the latter set did not develop the same ability.

Sherman says that while children might learn language skills from something as interactive as The Winston Show, “that certainly doesn’t mean that interacting with an iPad can approximate interacting with a human.” In other words, she does not recommend replacing parenting with an iPad.

Dr. Kaveri Subrahmanyam, associate director of the CDMC@LA, says that “children under two really don’t learn anything from screens,” but that something as physically interactive as The Winston Show is better, at least “compared to just tapping a screen…because it’s giving them practice [speaking].”

But regardless of whether the children learn, they do form emotional bonds with what are merely programmed characters, and shows such as The Winston Show are crafted to be engaging and enjoyable. Subrahmanyam suspects these emotional bonds might interfere with the “normative development of empathy,” simply because they could take away from time spent with real people during a time when children are learning the range of emotions.

Sherman pointed out that children generally bond with characters anyway. “All children [who] experience books, television, film or other stories learn to differentiate reality from fiction,” she says. “A programmed character will not confer the same emotional experience as talking to another human.”

These toys might help development; they might not. In the end, both Subrahmanyam and Sherman agree that parents should treat interactive media the same way they do any media — with time limits and guidelines.