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.

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.

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.