Prevalence and Characteristics of Manipulative Design in Mobile Applications Used by Children.

Importance: Manipulative design features (known as dark patterns) are common in video games and adult-directed technologies, but their prevalence in children's interactive media has not been described. Objectives: To develop a reliable coding scheme for gathering data on manipulative digital designs, describe their prevalence within apps used by a community-based sample of young children, and test hypotheses about associations of manipulative design features with socioeconomic status (SES). Design, Setting, and Participants: This cross-sectional study of a convenience sample of parents of children aged 3 to 5 years was conducted online. Eligible parents were legal guardians of a 3-to-5-year-old child, lived with their child at least 5 days per week, understood English, and were part of a family that owned at least 1 Android or iOS tablet or smartphone. For each participant, the 3 apps used for the longest duration by children with their own mobile devices were downloaded, played, and coded. Data were analyzed between April and August 2021. Exposures: Child SES, operationalized as parent educational attainment and household income-to-needs ratio. Main Outcomes and Measures: Researchers assigned each child a prevalence score for manipulative design features (overall, gameplay pressure, purchase pressure, and advertisement viewing pressure) within the apps children played. Results: Of 160 children in the sample, mean (SD) age was 4.0 (0.6) years; 120 children (75.0%) were non-Hispanic White, and 96 (60.0%) had a parent with a college degree or more. Manipulative designs promoted prolonged gameplay or purchases through 4 user experience typologies: parasocial relationship pressure occurred in 33 (24.8%) and 25 (18.8%) apps with characters; time pressure in 23 (17.3%) and 14 (10.5%) apps; navigation constraints in 61 (45.9%) and 49 (36.8%) apps; and attractive lures in 60 (45.1%) and 61 (45.9%) apps, respectively. Children from households whose parents had lower education levels had higher manipulative design prevalence scores than children whose parents had graduated from college (median [IQR] 3.7 [2.5-5.0] vs 3.0 [2.0-4.0]; P = .02), gameplay-prolonging design (2.3 [1.6-3.0] vs 2.0 [1.5-2.8]; P = .047), and purchase pressure (1.0 [0.5-1.5] vs 0.6 [0-1.3]; P = .02). Purchase pressure prevalence scores were higher for children from households with lower income (R = -0.18; P = .02). Conclusions and Relevance: Design features that encourage monetization of children's digital experiences were common in this sample and disproportionately occurred in apps used by children with lower SES.

From Moral Panic to Systemic Change: Making Child-Centered Design the Default.

Academic scholarship and public discourse about children's digital media use often invokes concepts such as 'screen time' that place the locus of responsibility on individual users and families rather than on designers creating digital environments. In this vision article, we argue that research, design, and policy frameworks that assume individual responsibility contribute to intensive parenting messaging about children's media use, are less likely than systemic approaches to achieve population-level change, and produce inequities in children's access to positive, child-centered media. Platforms (e.g., app marketplaces, video streaming services) act as entry points for children's use of digital spaces, and thus are strong determinants of children's experiences. As such, platforms are an ideal point of intervention for systemic change and have the potential to create equitable and child-centered digital environments at an ecosystem level. We contend that policies that encourage platforms to establish child-centered design as the default user interface will both create better experiences for children and relieve pressure on parents as gatekeepers. Finally, we review the types of research questions that could examine how to measure and optimize platforms for their impact on child wellbeing and outline steps researchers can take to provide evidence-based guidance to industry about designing ecosystems for children's best interests.

Distinctive Role of Symbolic Number Sense in Mediating the Mathematical Abilities of Children with Autism.

Despite reports of mathematical talent in autism spectrum disorders (ASD), little is known about basic number processing abilities in affected children. We investigated number sense, the ability to rapidly assess quantity information, in 36 children with ASD and 61 typically developing controls. Numerical acuity was assessed using symbolic (Arabic numerals) as well as non-symbolic (dot array) formats. We found significant impairments in non-symbolic acuity in children with ASD, but symbolic acuity was intact. Symbolic acuity mediated the relationship between non-symbolic acuity and mathematical abilities only in children with ASD, indicating a distinctive role for symbolic number sense in the acquisition of mathematical proficiency in this group. Our findings suggest that symbolic systems may help children with ASD organize imprecise information.