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TV Really Might Cause Autism
Alien54 writes "Cornell University researchers are reporting what appears to be a statistically significant relationship between autism rates and television watching by children under the age of 3. The researchers studied autism incidence in California, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Washington state. They found that as cable television became common in California and Pennsylvania beginning around 1980, childhood autism rose more in the counties that had cable than in the counties that did not. They further found that in all the Western states, the more time toddlers spent in front of the television, the more likely they were to exhibit symptoms of autism disorders. The Cornell study represents a potential bombshell in the autism debate."
It's for the children! Won't somebody PLEASE think of the children! FORGET IT! Ban electricity! For the children! For the children!
What about internet use, with sites such as youtube, will that cause autism as well?
Well, cable television was becoming more prevalent, yes, but wasn't detection of autism and recognition of its status as a disorder also becoming more acknoledged?
Oh, and exactly what debate is there about autism? I think I missed something here.
~ C.
oh that's A.D.D., what was this post about?
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
Damn, I read that as "TV Really Might Cause Atheism".
How disappointing!
Everyone, let's say this together. Come on, I want everyone to join in. Let's all yell it at the top of our lungs until the media hears us. Ready? Here we go:
CORRELATION DOES NOT EQUAL CAUSATION!
CORRELATION DOES NOT EQUAL CAUSATION!
CORRELATION DOES NOT EQUAL CAUSATION!
Now stop reporting on every correlation between disease X and social variable Y as though it were somehow equivalent to a randomized double-blind study on the effects of Y on X. Thank you.
"Toddlers are the stormtroopers of the Lord of Entropy."
I guess not anymore, huh?
Learn to separate truth from illusion. Because in this world, it's the hardest thing to do.
I call bullshit.
That is, it is entirely possible (and plausible) that a correlation exists. However I'd interpret it in the reverse way. That is, the study shows just that children born with autism are more likely to spend time watching TV (knowing the features of autism, this is entirely possible).
Moreover, the existence of a correlation does not show necessarily a cause-effect relationship. Do you remember Lisa Simpson showing Homer a rock that protected from tigers?
This kind of papers are what my collegues call "scientific pornography" -papers thrown up just to stir up controversy, but based on very fragile assumptions and with a few data inflated as much as possible. Quite a common occurrence, sadly, these days.
-- Patent no.123456: A way to personalize
Perhaps the problem is not Television, but rather, the quality of the shows catching children's interests. I highly doubt educational tv is causing autism. The content on channels like nickelodeon, disny, and even MTV is highly lacking. The method of constantly changing frames and displaying lots or colors does keep someone watching, but it makes it hard to concentrate. Could this be the cause?
Could there POSSIBLY be other factors at work?
How about the increased understanding of and accurate diagnosis of autism and autism-related disorders around that time?
How about the repetitive nature of television programming, especially kids shows, appealing to autistics as a source of consistency and comfort?
How about the fact that the places getting cable were also the places getting elevated concentrations of geeks, who seem to have genetic quirks that have this tendancy to result in autism-like disorders? Could that POSSIBLY have ANYTHING to do with a rise in autism in Washington, _Oregon_, and *CALIFORNIA*?
All tubes causes autism, so internet as well...
Dunno about TFTs
The Himalayan country of Bhutan only started recieving television in 1999. This was followed by a drastic increase in crime (including murder) in the tiny nation. It would be interesting to see if there's also an increase in autism, as this study would suggest.
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
NO!
A solid background in statistics is required to launch a bombshell like this. It is likely that these authors have that background.
Furthermore, economists (which one of the authors would seem to be based on his affiliation) are well trained in methods of robustly detecting effects in non-experimental data (such as this); whereas medical researchers are typically more involved with experimental data. Experimental data is much easier to deal with than non-experimental data. Indeed, one could argue that these sorts of studies are more likely to be carried out properly by economists trained in dealing with this sort of data.
The important aspect of this is that there was a natural experiment carried out where some counties received cable television and others didn't. Provided the counties that received cable television did so for essentially random reasons, this data is the equivalent of a randomised experimental trial. As such, the standard argument that correlation does not prove causation is much weaker. There might well be a third factor at work here, but hold those knee-jerk reactions. One needs to be a good statistician to detect these correlations - medical researchers can work out the reasons later.
Before anybody starts jeering stupidly and making wise about this subject, perhaps people should read this article from Scientific American: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colI D=1&articleID=000B7F38-893D-152E-88E283414B7F0000
Now for some of the usual comments people tend to spew out:
Correlation is not causation
This is true - but correlation indicates that there MAY BE a causation. Thus, when things are strongly correlated and there are other reasons to suspect a causal connection, it is well worth researching further.
Increased awareness
Perhaps 'increased awareness' of autism means that we discover more cases that were not previously recognised? Perhaps, but I don't think it is very likely. Full-blown autism is not something you overlook. It is a serious disorder that in most cases means lifelong disability, and it is unlike any other psychiatric disorder. The increased awareness, I suspect, mostly means that now we spot more of the milder cases, but it is not my impression that this is what this research is about.
So why is it that people on this list are hostile to the idea that maybe TV can contribute to the emergence of autism? My guess is that this is because people on the list tend to be heavy consumers of passive entertainment, like TV and computer games; you don't want to hear that it may be bad for you.
If you have read the article I referred to above, you will know that autism probably has a lot to do with the development of 'mirror neurons' in the brain; a neural system that makes us able to imitate what other people do. Like all neural systems, the mirror neurons need to be trained, and TV is probably not a very good role model for that, at least not if you are already weak in this area. So it is actually quite reasonable to suspect that watching too much TV at an early age may contribute to the development of autism.
The MMR vaccine:
http://www.badscience.net/?p=249
This idea that all one needs to understand is statistics in order to comment on a scientific discipline is incorrect. Analysis of statistics is important, but in order to draw conclusions from them, one really has to understand the field they are being made in. It is a common issue with economists who tend to view the numbers as the be all and end all without understanding where they have come from and what the greater issues at play around the numbers might be.
That's such an idiotic assumption that it essentially destroys the research on its own. Genuine randomness is incredibly important is selecting participants for any sort of psychological experiment, and I can think of a number of reasons off the top of head why there would be a correlation between the availability of cable TV and incidence of autism.For example, increased wealth makes cable TV a viable business to set up, but also allows parents to pay to have autistic children treated resulting an increased number of reported cases. Alternately, cable TV may only be launched in areas with a certain level of technological uptake.
There's also a theory that autism rates increase when technologically minded people start gathering together at workplaces (therefore breeding, therefore passing on (and concentrating) their autistic-related genes). There's another potential explanation for the correlation.
This is certainly not a study that psychologists would credit as being worthwhile, which highlights why people should have some idea why they're talking about before dropping bombshells like this.
CORRELATION DOES NOT EQUAL CAUSATION!
I think that the study itself really drives this point home. If you read the actual paper (PDF file) a major part of their case is:
1) When the weather is lousy, children watch more television
2) Places with a lot of rain and snow have more autistic children
I'd imagine that when the weather is bad, children also are more likely to use umbrellas. Therefore, by their logic, umbrellas cause autism.
what the hell is TV ?? I only wach internet series 16 hours a day!!!
Many of us whach TV to try to understand the world, since as far as we can see, its a deeply f**ked up place, where people kill for fun, where people wage wars because they can and where people do jobs they don't want to do and then moan about it, yet refuse to do anything about it.
TV helps us understand the insane world around us, help us learn how people respond, what fatial movements mean, what body language as a whole means. We don't know thease things almost from birth like the majority of people. We have to learn them like somebody would learn quantum mecanics, except feelings don't have finite rules.
one fact for you, they tested all the enterants for Oxford Uni in the UK one year, and found that somewhere in the reagon of 75% had an "autistic spectrum disorder", and I would be interested to see about how many people on
anybody interested in more info, email me or message me on gmail (badspyro@)
thanks,
Badspyro
In Canada we have warning labels on cigarette packs. Big warning labels. Cigarettes cause cancer, etc. So, naturally, some dollar store entrepreneur creates fake warning labels.
;-)
... it's obviously not a perfect analogy, but I've been debugging way too long to care]
e -against-the-mighty-machines-day-9-of-no-tv.
Anyway, when I was a stereotypical angry young philosophy student, I thought it would be fun to make my own fake warning labels to put on my cigarette packs. So, who did I turn to? Hume, of course.
So, my cigarette packs had a big warning: "Correlation Does Not Imply Causation" on them. I thought it was a good joke, by philosophy joke standards anyway.
Now, I knew perfectly well that in this case even though it did not imply it, it was in fact true. Of course cigarretes caused cancer. In many cases correlation is, um, correlated with causation. But I was 18 so I didn't care; I thought it was funny.
What a joke.
So, the point is: correlation is a start. If there is a correlation, you should look for ways to establish whether causation exists or not.
Now, you usually cannot do real proper experiments on humans with smoking (starting with a large random set of non-smokers, making half of them smoke their entire lives, and seeing how many of each group died of cancer). The ethics boards at the university wouldn't approve
So, do you just give up and say "thank you for smoking" or "well, we'll never prove anything according to David Hume then". No, you don't. There are statistical tools like factor analysis which let people smarter than me figure out how much of A is (probably) caused by B, etc.
Anyway, I have a 2 year old son now, and stuff I thought was funny at 18 is certainly not funny anymore over a decade later. I quit smoking. I certainly wouldn't give my son a cigarette, ever.
However, if there is a strong correlation between TV and autism, I have to wonder whether I am in effect doing something similar. What if further anaylsis proves (as much as you can prove anything) that it is indeed a cause?
What would I have done??
[yeah, yeah, there's a mountain of evidence in one of the cases vs. one study in another
"Correlation Does Not Imply Causation" does not mean act insanely. You have only ever seen gravity by correlation, but you still believe in it. (Yes you do. Wipe that smirk off your face.)
Now, coincidentally, I also cancelled cable TV after reading Gregg Easterbrook's original Slate article. Obligatory blog whoring: I blogged about it at http://peterarmstrong.com/articles/2006/10/08/rag
Do I think there is conclusive, Hume-would-be-proud proof that TV causes autism. No.
Do I think that TV is good for young children?
Would I give my 2 year old son a cigarette?
Correlation is need to proove causation. But by itself alone it doesn't implie it. Other finding are necessary like models that explains WHY such causality should be expected (What's the biochemistry involved ?). Or see Koch's postulate : expremients that proove that by adding/removing the candidate cause ou can somewhat control the effect.
But on the other hand some mecanism is partially known. Also there are finding pointing to the fact that autism is associated and may be caused by some abnormal brain wiring that already happen in utero, thus debunking the old "it's-the-mother's-relationship-fault" supposed cause. Also if it start that early in the developpement, later exposure to the TV is less likely to be the main causing factor.
And in this case I think it's clearly a case of pure correlation that depend on an additionnal common cause. From what I've understood during my studies (got a degree in medecine) and what I've observed (one of my brothers has autism) : one of the caracteristics of an autist is being much less capable to anticipate or to cope with complex not easily predicted event. In this case the TV is reassuringly predictible : once turned it just plays the show. No complex social interraction required. And also, if wired to a VCR or DVD player, the TV can always play that specific shows that the autist knows and can correctly anticipate, etc...
TV isn't a cause *of* autism. But, the cognitive mecanism that are specific of autism, also happen to find the TV very reassuring.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The word Autism is a catchall for a wide spectrum of disorders, from severly impaired kids to the fashionably diagnosed little darlings belonging to attention-starved suburban housewives, which tends to muddy the diagnostic waters a bit. Most seriously Autistic children manifest symptons almost from birth. Despite what some parents claim as a regression during the toddler years, I suspect kids are born with it. It's simply difficult to diagnose a child with a psychological disorder before they are old enough to even walk or talk.
If you want a controlled study, here it is: I have two children, by the same wife. One is perfectly normal. The other is autistic. I suspected there was something wrong with the Autistic one by the time he was nine months old. (Most babies love to be held. This one was completely hyper, and would squirm out of everyone's arms as soon as he was physically capable of it. He rarely slept. He walked early, but displayed odd mannerisms. While many toddlers are fascinated by television, he manifested no interest in watching it at that age at all.) But he was not diagnosed until he was three, because there was very little diagnostic criteria to go one. Babies really don't do much other than cry, eat, sleep and poop.
They both watched plenty of TV by the time they were three. Just like I did in the sixties. They are 10 and 11 now. I taught the eldest to read the usual way, and he is a voracious reader. He still loves TV. And video games. And fart jokes, and every other thing a normal eleven year old loves. He's still not autistic. The youngest, the Autistic one, would rarely sit still for a story. He liked to flip through books, but didn't want to be read to. He can read now, though. Know why? I turned the English subtitles on whenever he watched his favorite DVD's.
He learned to read watching television.
This study is bunk. It's not a theory. It's more like the plot to Halloween III.
As a pediatrician trained in child development (and the parent of an autistic teenager), I've got a strong interest and background in this, and I can tell you quite plainly that the paper is crap.
This is a spectacularly good example of really stupid statistical games. I only skimmed it (Acrobat Reader blew up on me as I tried to save it, and I'll get another copy later), but these people did the following amazing things:
1. Accept as fact that autism itself is increasing (as opposed to the diagnosis of autism). This is possible, but contentious and somewhat controversial. I'll spare you the full story, but the general opinion is that while the disorder is more common than it once was, changes in diagnosis (and benefits for diagnosis) make it hard to do more than guess at the actual rate of increase.
2. Consider de novo a hypothesis "that early childhood television watching is an important trigger for the onset of autism." They do note that nobody else has bothered to consider this, but don't spend much time wondering why. Apparently, they're special. Perhaps because nobody has measured this in a useful manner? They do admit this, but they find a solution!
3. Because there are no good numbers for early television watching, they use precipitation as a proxy for television watching. Apparently, if it rains, you're likely inside with the tube on. They do show a strong positive correlation between rainfall and autism. Yep, that's right - rain causes autism.
4. But wait - it can't be the rain, it has to be the television! That's what we started trying to prove, anyway, so it's important to stay focused. They try it another way: they consider the availability of cable. They show that autism correlates with the availability of cable. No, really, it does. Of course, diagnosis of a LOT of chronic developmental syndromes increases with affluence, because of the increased availability of medical care and the reduction in "grab-bag" diagnoses like "mental retardation". But still, it must be the cable.
5. Having neatly done all the "proof" they require, they then proceed to tear the numbers apart and "prove" that 40% of autism in California is triggered by early television watching, while only 17% is triggered in PA. Why, we don't know, but it appears that rain, or cable, or maybe just TV is more powerful in CA than in PA. Or something like that.
I don't have time for a complete fisking right now, but I may do it later. Aside from the basic methodologic errors (confusing correlation with causation, adopting a highly questionable proxy indicator without validating it, and spending almost no time ruling out confounding factors or tainted data), there remain the dozens of smaller tactical problems that should have sidelined this turkey. I assume the peer reviewers, if there are any, were on drugs.
This paper will be a bombshell, all right. I'll use it over and over again as I explain to medical students and colleagues that you don't have to have much in the way of actual brains to write a scientific paper. Or, as I said about another paper in journal club once, "the font is nice, and I like the layout of the tables. It's a shame the actual science is such garbage."
I see a number of posts debating the methods of data collection and what it could possibly mean. The real work that must be done now is to investigate these claims and investigate possible mechanisms. If this claim is true, there are going to be rather intense repurcussions. My money? It's not the television itself, it is the non-interactive world that it produces.
Autism is on the rise http://www.fightingautism.org/idea/autism.php. My mother is a school nurse and she's noticed a large increase in the size of the special ed classes. The number of students that are affected (and yes, you can tell that these kids really do have autism by observing them) has gone from a handfull to enough to fill more than two classrooms.
Think about what the possible mechanisms could be. It is not going to be anything exotic like radiation or refresh rates or the like. We are plopping children down in front of the TV during the time their brains are 'wiring'. Their brains are learning to deal with a world that fits in a tiny box and that they have no control over. The brain isn't something that plops out of the womb fully done; it learns to adapt to the sensations around it. A recent study suggests that an imbalance of communication pathways is a likely mechanism of autism. It is known in development that pathways are pruned as children develop ( Early Brain Development ).
So, plop a kid down in front of the TV for hours a day. They are transfixed and their brains are wiring to cope with a world in a box that they can provide no input to or alter in any way but changing channels, volume level or the off button. That's really not a stretch. Prepare for articles about tv watching monkeys.
m0nstr42.blogspot.com
Mission-creep in the psychiatric-industrial complex has caused the expansion of many syndromes to encompass more and more people, because the more people you can diagnose as having a disease, the more money the psychiatric-pharmaceutical industry can make.
/. readers would gladly be diagnosed as autistic by the psychiatric-pharmaceutical industry, I suspect.
It used to be that the term "autism" was reserved for severely impaired kids. Now its definition has been expanded to include anybody on the slightly geeky side.
Most
We must be alert to the danger that public policy could become captive to a scientific-technological elite. - Eisenhower
I wish I'd gotten in here sooner. I am officially diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, and I spent most of my childhood without TV. Even though I had to entertain myself in other ways such as reading, and indulging different hobbies (having several obsessive hobbies is in itself an autistic trait) I still turned out the way I did. The only way that TV could affect someone in this way is if they were already genetically or developmentally predisposed to it (or EVERYONE would be autistic, since nearly every kid watches TV in developed countries) Also, it pisses me off when people try to "cure" autism. It's not some disease that I have, it's a part of who I am. If it were possible to remove all of my autistic traits, I wouldn't be the same person after said process was done. Autism is just a different way of seeing the world and interpreting things around me, and even though people mean well, the fact that they would want to override who I am and attempt to make me like they are does kind of insult me.
"It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
From the paper: If, for example, one compares the US Department of Education's reported number of school-aged
children diagnosed with autism in 1999-2000 with the similar figure for 2003-2004, one sees that
over those four years the reported number has more than doubled.
Does anybody really think that the rates of autism really doubled in this time period. Isn't it far more likely that the rate of diagnosis simply went up. What would cause parents to become aware of this unusual condition called autism? Maybe they saw a segment about it on TV?
Isn't it simply possible that autism rates are correlated with TV watching because many americans get much of their information about the larger world by watching TV, and therefore the higher the rates of TV watching (determined in this study by looking at cable installation rates and precipitation rates - people watch more TV when it's rainy out ) mean higher rates of awareness of autism as a condition to ask your child's doctor about? So now, instead of being diagnosed as retarded, the child is diagnosed as autistic because the child's parents saw a segment about autism on cable TV on a rainy day.
My suspicion is that the problem is due to the (over) stimulation of the visual centers in very young children. Have you noticed how incredibly brief the duration of one camera shot is in modern TV? Barely 5 seconds. SECONDS! The point-of-view is constantly shifting from one camera to another, and it's common with children's programming to have a hand-held camera that bobs and sways in order to keep the show "interesting" and increase concentration. Add to that the visual effects and zoom/fades/transitions plus all the audio crap and it's a miracle any child emerges with his brain intact.
Go watch a classic episode of I Love Lucy or The Honeymooner's or The Twilight Zone. It's not uncommon for one camera shot to last four minutes. And at that point in time (I'm thinking 1960s and earlier) it was common to listen to dramas on the radio -- Green Lantern, Lone Ranger, The Strangler, etc. -- so the listener was actively involved in building mental imagery. Kids who have been raised on a steady diet of modern tv don't have the patience for old-fashioned TV or stories (or, for that matter, conversations requiring well-developed listening skills)... it's too "boring." (IMO, their brains aren't well adapted to concentrate for that period of time and they find it tiring and/or difficult.)
...and here we have another M.D. who thinks he knows something about science. I wish medical schools would concentrate less on memorization and more on critical thinking skills, especially with respect to statistical studies.
This is a spectacularly good example of really stupid statistical games.
In actuality, the paper is a good example of the way in which social research can take advantage of natural experiments.
I only skimmed it...
Then why write with such unwarranted authority and in such certain terms about its contents and conclusions?
Aside from the basic methodologic errors (confusing correlation with causation, adopting a highly questionable proxy indicator without validating it, and spending almost no time ruling out confounding factors or tainted data), there remain the dozens of smaller tactical problems...
They made none of the errors you list. I would like to think you might have realized this had you bothered (as I did) to actually read the paper, but based on the evidence of your post, I would be reckless to assume that.
Er, read first, then complain if warranted. The abstract doesn't make it clear, but the data does indeed suggest that they've found a trigger for autism. Very interesting.
Does anybody really think that the rates of autism really doubled in this time period. Isn't it far more likely that the rate of diagnosis simply went up. What would cause parents to become aware of this unusual condition called autism? Maybe they saw a segment about it on TV?
1. Something is WRONG with your child when they are autistic. You know there is because she/he doesn't act normally. A minimally responsible parent figures out what it is.
2. The medical condition of autism is well-defined. It doesn't just visit the child like a common cold. http://www.nimh.nih.gov/publicat/autism.cfm and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autism
3. "retarded" is not a medical condition. That is the social term for a host of developmental problems.
people watch more TV when it's rainy out
This is the West. It doesn't rain much... There's no excuse for watching more TV other than babysitting your child for you. I'll go further than that and say there is no reason for children to watch television until at least 5. But this means parents have to raise their children. So it's an unpopular opinion.
Please consider your opinions in this matter as poorly constructed as the science you claim is flawed.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
1. First the timing of more cable with the increased diagnosis of autism may be a coincidence. For a one-or-two year-olds, cable doesn't mean more to watch. There's almost no programming for that age, unless there is a round-the-clock Teletubies channel I've not heard about.
2. They may be confusing cause and effect. I worked with austistic children. They're not stimulated by contact with other people like ordinary children, but they are often attracted by repetitive patterns of light of the sort a small child might find on TV. As a result, the parents might have been more likely to put them in front of a TV as a pacifier.( And that might have even made the child's autistic tendencies worse.) In such a case, TV was not so much the cause as a diagnostic sign.
I'll see if the authors deal with those problems in their paper. It's hard to believe that they don't.
And TV addicts shouldn't get all in a dither about this. At most, this just means that parents shouldn't put little baby Johnny down in front of a TV. It's not going to turn a 22=year-old into an austitic.
--Mike Perry, author of Untangling Tolkien
So, my cigarette packs had a big warning: "Correlation Does Not Imply Causation" on them. I thought it was a good joke, by philosophy joke standards anyway.
It's worth noting that lung cancer rates only exploded post-WWII. People had been smoking for thousands of years, but lung cancer was a relative unknown.
The change was that some years before manure, which had been used for fertilizer on the tobacco plants, was requisitioned for the war effort (gunpowder, explosives or whatever). Tobacco companies had to switch to Rock Phosphate to fertilize their plants. They liked it because their tobacco plants grew quicker & bigger, with less labor invested in gathering animal dung.
You don't hear much about the downfall: rock phosphate has low levels of natural radioactivity. Tobacco plants concentrate radioactive ions in their leaves... A dose or two of rock phosphate isn't much for concern, but when applied to the same fields year after year, the radiation levels in the plants have become significant.
With that said, I Don't smoke, never have, and Don't encourage it. If I did smoke, I would buy organic tobacco (American Spirit, for example) and roll my own, or perhaps "stuff my own", into a pre-rolled paper w/ a filter, like my college roommate did. It's cheaper, much much healthier to boot, and you know exactly what you're inhaling (that's a reference to cigarette companies putting all sorts of weird chemicals in their products).
Search for 'radioactive tobacco' for more information.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
My son has high functioning autism and his symptoms showed long before he started watching tv. Rates are increasing because there is better diagnosis information available to the doctors-origionally they were clumped as mentally disabled or retarded. To say TV is causing autism is a farce IMHO. We have actually used video games to increase my sons ability to cross over midline. He is very proficient playing games. There is real science going on now that has located a gene that may be the link to why it happens. They are trying to manipulate that gene into mice to see what different outside influences trigger autism. They will test mercury in that study since it has been used in vaccines for babies. Yes they "concluded" that it is not causing autism in other studies but why did the manufacturer of the vaccine get congress to make a law excluding manufacturers from liability? There is too much misguided studies on autism-I feel the gene route will be the one that will give the best answers.
Much as I think TV is suitable only for folks with water on the brain, it's important to remember that a statistical correlation (which is what this is) does not mean that TV causes autism, or that autism causes TV. It's easy to imagine a scenario in which autistic children simply watch more TV because one of the main symptoms of the disorder is difficulty interacting with others. That said, it is a fascinating bit of data, and one that means we better find out what staring at TVs _does_ cause (if anything) before there's nobody left with a normal brain to do it.
Correllation does not equate causation. That's all that needs to be said about this experiment.