Addicted To Screens? You’re Not Alone – Now Marmosets Might Be Too

What is it about our screens that keeps us coming back to them? Why do we continue to scroll past the point of finding what we went on our phones for in the first place? Those are questions that researchers are still trying to answer – and marmosets armed with iPads might just help them along the way.

In a study carried out by a team from the Central Institute for Experimental Medicine and Life Science in Japan, 14 marmosets had a tablet placed in their cage for 10 minutes. The screen simultaneously showed them nine small, soundless videos of different nonhuman primate species – but if the marmosets tapped on any of them, the video they touched was zoomed in on, and the sound of nonhuman primate chattering began to play.

These “training sessions” were repeated two or three times a week for a total of two months.

But before we dive into what happened as a result of those two months of training, it’s first worth pointing out that the purpose of this study wasn’t to draw any significant comparisons between humans and marmosets when it comes to how our dependence on screens works. 

Instead, it’s an investigation into whether marmosets could be used as a model for behavioral research on learning, specifically when it comes to how sights and sounds might affect behavior. Would they respond to these things as a reward, in the same way that they do for a more typical treat, like a yummy bit of fresh fruit?

That certainly seems to be the case, according to the researchers, who wrote that the study “demonstrated that tablet screen-touch behavior in the marmoset could be shaped and maintained by an audiovisual stimulus consequence.”

By the end of the two months, eight of the 10 marmosets that made it into the final analysis were tapping regularly, suggesting that they associated this behavior with receiving a reward. Marmosets as a model in this case appear to work, then.

But here’s where we discover why this model could give us a better understanding of why we humans can end up dependent on our screens. Even when the researchers did something called extinction testing, where the marmosets were presented with a dark screen instead of zooming and sound after tapping the screen – i.e. they didn’t get a reward – four of the marmosets showed no decrease in tapping away. 

This suggests that it might be any sort of change on the screen that can lead to the continued tapping – which could explain why we spend hours watching TikToks but not come away feeling like we’ve actually gained anything from it.

That’s only a suggestion, of course – but this marmoset model could be used to investigate this and other ideas about how and why humans use screens in the way we do.

“Future research based on the present study may enhance our understanding of human audiovisual reinforced behaviors related to the use of computers, tablets, smartphones, and others; it may also provide insights regarding factors that influence audiovisual-stimulus dependence syndrome in humans in the future,” the authors conclude.

It’s not just humans and marmosets that can end up glued to screens though – it might be a problem for zoo animals, too.

The study is published in the International Journal of Comparative Psychology.