Dad · StoryBeam Kids builder
What Her Brain Is Actually Doing When She Listens With Her Eyes Closed
I went looking for the real research behind a hunch I had watching my daughter listen to a story instead of watching one, and it turned out to be more specific, and more humbling, than I expected.
A few months ago I was half-watching my daughter during a bedtime episode of the show she does with her mom. She wasn't looking at anything. Her eyes were closed, she was lying flat on her back, and every few seconds her face would do something, a flicker of a smile, a little frown, once she reached a hand up toward the ceiling like she was touching something that wasn't there. I know what she looks like when she watches a video. This wasn't that. Something else was happening.
I'm a software developer. I build the app my daughter uses, so it's easy for me to tell myself a flattering story about why audio is good for her. I try not to trust that story on its own. So I went looking for what researchers who study this for a living have actually found, not what a dad who builds an audio app wants to be true.
The most specific, most directly relevant research I could verify comes out of Cincinnati Children's Hospital, from a pediatrician named John Hutton who directs the hospital's Reading and Literacy Discovery Center. His team put preschoolers into an fMRI scanner and had them experience the same story in three different formats, then compared what their brains did.
What the researchers actually did
The study (published across two papers, one in Brain Connectivity in 2019 and a companion analysis in Brain Imaging and Behavior in 2020) scanned 27 kids who completed the full protocol, out of 33 who started. Most were around four to five years old. Each child heard or watched three different stories by the same author, about five minutes each, one in audio-only format, one as an illustrated storybook with narration, and one as an animated cartoon. Afterward, the researchers tested how well each child could recall facts from the story, and compared functional connectivity, essentially how much different brain networks were talking to each other, across the three conditions.
That's it. It's a small study, one children's hospital, one age band, one specific set of measurements. I want to say that up front because it matters for how much weight this can carry.
What they found
Three things came out of it that I can actually stand behind, because they're stated plainly in the papers themselves, not implied by a headline.
First, on comprehension: kids who only listened to the story remembered it just as well as kids who saw it illustrated. Kids who watched the animated version remembered less. The researchers reported this difference as statistically significant.
Second, on what was happening inside the language system: when the researchers compared the illustrated condition to the audio-only condition, connectivity inside the brain's language network went down, while connectivity between the visual system, the "default mode" network (associated with self-generated thought and imagination), and the cerebellum went up. Their read on this was that pictures took some of the load off the language system, easing what they called the strain that audio alone puts on it. In plain terms: without pictures, her brain has to do more of the work of building the scene from words alone.
Third, on the animated condition: connectivity between networks dropped across the board relative to both other formats, most noticeably compared to the illustrated version. The researchers' interpretation was that the moving images pulled attention toward visual processing at the expense of the networks integrating with each other, working together the way they did in the other two formats.
What this doesn't tell us
Here's where I have to be careful, because it would be easy to round this off into "audio wins" and I don't think that's honest. The researchers' own conclusion wasn't that pure audio was best for this age group. It was that the illustrated condition, pictures plus narration, looked the most balanced: enough visual support to ease the language system's load, without shutting down the imaginative and integrative work the way the animated version seemed to. If anything, this study is an argument for reading picture books aloud, not for audio-only listening.
It's also one study of 27 preschoolers measuring one narrow slice of brain activity during one short story each. It doesn't tell us anything about older kids, about longer-term development, or about whether any of this translates into a measurable real-world outcome years later. I haven't found research that answers those questions, so I'm not going to pretend it exists.
What I think it does support, carefully, is this: listening to a story without pictures didn't cost my daughter anything in terms of understanding it, compared to seeing it illustrated. And it asked something different of her brain than watching it would have. The animated version, in this study, looked more passive in a specific, measurable sense. Less cross-talk between the systems that handle attention, memory, and language. More load on visual processing alone.
Why StoryBeam Kids is audio-only anyway
So no, this research isn't the reason I built the app without pictures or video. It doesn't say audio-only is the optimal format for a four-year-old's brain. It says audio-only doesn't shortchange comprehension, and that it seems to ask more of a child's own capacity to build the scene herself, rather than being handed one.
The rest of the decision is mine, not the study's. I didn't want a screen in her hands at bedtime or in the car. I didn't want autoplay deciding what she hears next, or an algorithm optimizing for how long she stays on the app. I didn't want ads. I wanted every show in the catalog to be something I'd actually listened to first. Those are product and parenting choices, not conclusions a neuroscience paper handed me.
What the research gave me was permission to stop worrying that I was shortchanging her by leaving the pictures out. It didn't prove I made the best possible choice for her developing brain. Nobody has run that study yet, and I'd be lying if I told you they had.
I still don't know exactly what she was picturing that night with her eyes closed. But I know her understanding of the story wasn't the thing she was giving up by not watching it.
Sources
- Hutton JS, Dudley J, Horowitz-Kraus T, DeWitt T, Holland SK. "Functional Connectivity of Attention, Visual, and Language Networks During Audio, Illustrated, and Animated Stories in Preschool-Age Children." — Brain Connectivity, 2019, Vol. 9(7), pp. 580-592
- Hutton JS, Dudley J, Horowitz-Kraus T, DeWitt T, Holland SK. "Differences in Functional Brain Network Connectivity During Stories Presented in Audio, Illustrated, and Animated Format in Preschool-Age Children." — Brain Imaging and Behavior, 2020, Vol. 14(1), pp. 130-141
- The effect of story format on children's brains (explainer summarizing the Hutton studies) — BOLD (Blog on Learning and Development)
- What's Going On In Your Child's Brain When You Read Them A Story? — NPR Ed
- John S. Hutton, MD, MS bio, Reading and Literacy Discovery Center, Cincinnati Children's — Learning and the Brain speaker profile
Jason is a software developer, father to the founder of StoryBeam Kids, and reviews every show in the catalog before it appears.