Abstract
Increased screen time has been linked to attention difficulties in early childhood, raising concerns among parents and professionals. However, it remains unclear how screen use influences the development of visual attention and visual processing across childhood. In this study, we examined associations between daily screen time and performance on visual search and contrast sensitivity tasks in children aged 4-9 years. Screen time was associated with age-related changes in visual search performance, with different patterns observed across task types and visual features. In the conjunction search task, younger children tended to perform better on luminance-based trials at lower levels of screen exposure, with age-related changes converging across feature types with more screen time. In contrast, in the feature search task, younger children tended to show better luminance-based performance with higher screen exposure. Age-related changes in color-based search tended to remain relatively stable across screen time levels in both tasks. In addition, greater daily screen use was modestly associated with reduced contrast sensitivity across feature channels. Together, these findings suggest that screen time may differentially relate to the development of early visual processing and higher-level visual selective attention, with luminance processing appearing particularly sensitive to variation in daily screen exposure.