University of Cambridge

Children who start reading for pleasure at an early age tend to perform better on cognitive tests and have better mental health as they enter their teens, a study of more than 10,000 US youth found.

In a study published in Psychological Medicineresearchers from England and China found it 12 hours a week is the optimal amount of reading and it is associated with improved brain structure, which may help explain the findings.

Reading for pleasure can be an important and enjoyable childhood activity. Unlike spoken and auditory language, which develop quickly and easily in young children, reading is a taught skill that is acquired and developed through explicit learning over time.

During childhood and adolescence, our brains develop, making it an important time to form behaviors that support our cognitive development and promote good brain health. However, until recently, it was unclear what impact, if any, it would have on encouraging children to read from an early age on their brain development, cognition and mental health later in life.

To investigate this, researchers from the Universities of Cambridge and Warwick in England and Fudan University in China analyzed data from the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development Group (ABCD) in the US, which recruited more than 10,000 young adolescents.

The team analyzed a variety of data, including clinical interviews, cognitive tests, mental and behavioral assessments, and brain scans, and compared young people who started reading for pleasure at a relatively young age (between the ages of two and nine) with those of them. who started doing it later or not at all. The analysis controlled for many important factors, including socioeconomic status.

Of the 10,243 participants studied, nearly half (48%) had little experience of reading for pleasure or did not start reading until childhood. The remaining half have spent between three and ten years reading for pleasure.

The team found a strong association between reading for pleasure at an early age and positive performance in adolescence on cognitive tests that measure factors such as verbal learning, memory and speech development, and school academic performance.

These kids are also better off Mental healthas judged by a series of clinical scores and parent-teacher reports, showed fewer signs of stress and depression, as well as a better attention span and fewer behavioral problems, such as aggression and rule breaking.

Children who start reading for pleasure earlier also tend to spend less screen time, for example watching TV or using smartphones or tablets, during the week and on weekends as teenagers, and also tend to sleep longer.

When the researchers looked at brain scans of groups of adolescents, they found that those participants who began reading for pleasure at an early age exhibited a sizable amount of total brain area and volume, including certain brain regions that play an important role in the brain’s cognitive function. Other brain areas that differed between these groups were previously shown to be associated with better mental health, behavior and attention.

Number: Young adolescent brain structure with cortical and subcortical areas related to initial RfP assessment scores, cognition, and psychopathology. (a) Association of baseline RfP with total cortical volume (left panel, mm3) and total brain volume (TBV) (right panel, mm3). (b,c) Brain maps showing significantly increased specific cortical and subcortical areas in young adolescents with higher baseline RfP levels (rLMM values ​​ranging from 0.038 to 0.064). Brain regions with greater area/volume positively related to initial RfP are represented in red. (d,e) Cortical areas that had a significant positive association with the crystallized combined cognition score (in d) and the total cognition score (in e). Regions where larger area is positively associated with higher cognitive scores are represented in red. (Only regions with rLMM > 0.055 are shown here.) (f) Most of the initial RfP-related increase in cortical areas shown in (b) are overlapping regions that are also positively associated with crystallized cognition scores and total cognition scores. (g,h) Cortical areas that had a significant negative association with attention problems (in g) and total problem scores (in h). Regions that have a negative association between brain areas and psychopathological judgment (ie, reduced cortical areas are associated with higher attention problem scores) are represented in blue. (i) Brain regions that overlap with their regions positively related to baseline RfP and negatively related to attention problems and the total problem score are shown. All covariates adjusted. p<0.05.