The Computational Mechanisms of Social Media Use in Youth

General Overview

The MediaMinds project aims to address the urgent need to understand how social media engagement impacts youth, aged 12-22, focusing on neurocognitive development. Social media plays a crucial role in fulfilling the developmental needs for social connection and feedback among youth. However, the heightened sensitivity of the developing brain to social rewards and influence also poses risks, such as compulsive use and exposure to unreliable information. This project seeks to develop novel computational models to formalize the complex interactions between cognitive processes, motivation, and social media affordances, thereby advancing our understanding of the driving forces and impacts of social media on youth.

The team will consist of the PI, two PhDs and two Postdocs, as well as a large network of collaborators and co-supervisors.  The total funding for this project is 2M euros for a period of 5 years and is divided over two main work packages.

Work Package 1: Social Feedback Processing

Work Package 1 delves into the role of social feedback processing in social media engagement among youth. Building on reinforcement learning theories, this package aims to develop innovative models to map how social media rewards interact with youth’s reward sensitivity, need for social belonging, social comparison, and habit formation. By analyzing Instagram trace data and conducting experiments where participants post images and receive feedback, the project will test hypotheses related to developmental changes in sensitivity to social feedback, social deprivation, and the formation of social media habits. This research will provide detailed insights into how youth process and respond to social feedback, contributing to a deeper understanding of their engagement with social media platforms.

Work Package 2: Social Information Processing

Work Package 2 focuses on modeling belief updating as a Bayesian process, exploring how youth weigh personal beliefs against social information. This package investigates how various factors, such as the prestige and expertise of the information source, identification with the source, message agreement, affective content, and social validation, influence belief updating. By using a combination of trace data and controlled experiments, including attitude change tasks and misinformation detection studies, this work package aims to uncover the developmental differences in how youth process social information and discern credible from false information. This research will enhance our knowledge of the cognitive mechanisms underlying social information processing in the context of social media.

Research Methods

The MediaMinds project employs a diverse array of research methods to achieve its objectives. These include the development of computational models grounded in neurocognitive development, reinforcement learning, and Bayesian belief updating theories. Experimental tasks designed for ecological validity will be used to simulate social media interactions in controlled settings. Additionally, the project will utilize social media trace data to link experimental findings with real-world online behavior. Neuroimaging techniques, such as fMRI, will be employed to investigate the neural correlates of social feedback and information processing. This multi-method approach, integrating experimental, longitudinal, and neuroimaging data, will provide a comprehensive framework for understanding the impact of social media on youth.