Is SpongeBob turning young children’s minds to mush?

According to a study, watching a little bit of a SpongeBob cartoon negatively affected four-year-olds’ attention spans.

The study, published online Monday by the journal Pediatrics, found this to be true.

Sixty children were randomly assigned to either watch SpongeBob, or the slower-paced PBS cartoon Caillou or assigned to draw pictures instead of watching television for nine minutes.

Right after, the kids took mental function tests; those who had watched SpongeBob did measurably worse than the others.

“What executive function basically measures is your ability to stay on task, to not be distracted and to persist on task,” Dr. Dimitri Christakis, a pediatrician at Seattle Children’s Hospital, wrote in a commentary accompanying the study performed by researchers.

The PBS and picture-drawing groups performed equally well on the tests; the SpongeBob group scored significantly worse. Watching a full half-hour fast-paced cartoon show could be even more detrimental, the study authors write.

“Most parents worry too much about how much TV their children watch and not enough about what they watch,” he says. “It’s not about turning the TV off. It’s about changing the channel.”

Although the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that kids under age two not watch any television, the group says a limited amount is okay for older children as long as it’s no more than one to two hours a day of educational programs.

SpongeBob show’s more rapid pace and fantastic characters might be too much for preschoolers’ brains to take in.

“It confirms something that parents have observed for some time,” Christakis says of the study. “They put their kids in front of television, particularly fast-paced programming, to quiet them down, but when the TV goes off, the kids are more amped up than they were before.”

But the blame shouldn’t be put on SpongeBob, Nickelodeon spokesman David Bittler says.  “SpongeBob is produced for 6- to 11-year-olds. Four-year-olds are clearly not the intended demographic for this show.”