Have Attention Spans Been Declining?

Re:Have Attention Spans Been Declining? – Yes, 65% by throwaway2037 on Tuesday July 25, 2023 @07:51AM (#36860943)

    The flip side is that when people get used to consuming content in 30 second blipverts, they become unable to maintain attention through a 10 second break in the action.

I see this written so frequently. Is there any studies to back up this claim? Please forgive me: Normally, I abhor the "citation please" type of response, but this claim is misleading to me. It just sounds like grumpy old person complaining about speed of the world and young(er) people.

Example: I tried Googling for "does consuming short content make it harder to focus on longer content?". None of the content is scientific research, just a bunch of blowhards writing "it's never been worse" blog posts.

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Re:Have Attention Spans Been Declining? – Yes, 65% by hanselot on Tuesday July 25, 2023 @09:20AM (#36861800)

Well, I can't give you a neurological point of view on it, but if you train an LLM to be great at handling a context size of 512 tokens, when you try to ask it to do a task which requires greater context length (or in this context - attention span), the responses become incoherent, scattered and perplex as hell.

Which I imagine to be what would happen to a human if they trained their brain to process information of a certain context length exclusively.

So yeah, perhaps your brain becomes amazing at processing succinct information that's been engineered to be short, to the point and has none of the subtext or subtlety that you could include in a larger context.

That being said, perhaps that's exactly the kind of mental capacity you need for high context switching professions, I'm not sure which those are yet, but I'm sure there has to be someone in the world that has a use for that.

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Re:Have Attention Spans Been Declining? – Yes, 65% by maroonblazer on Tuesday July 25, 2023 @09:47AM (#36862132)

> Is there any studies to back up this claim?

Did you read TFA? It's the entire subject of the piece.

One could analogize attention as a muscle. If you're only lifting 5KG dumbbells, you're not going to be able to lift 25KG.

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Re:Have Attention Spans Been Declining? – Yes, 65% by anthlax on Tuesday July 25, 2023 @10:41AM (#36862975)

The articles conclusion is explicitly that there is no valuable literature on the subject

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Re:Have Attention Spans Been Declining? – Yes, 65% by GravelRocks on Wednesday July 26, 2023 @10:06AM (#36877954)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headline...

How anyone could read that article, even just skim it, and come out thinking that it was presenting evidence that this is a well researched topic is beyond me. The entire point of the article is that they couldn't fine studies on the topic...

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Re:Have Attention Spans Been Declining? – Yes, 65% by blackbear_ on Tuesday July 25, 2023 @10:12AM (#36862521)

Google is a terrible tool to find scientific research. Rather use Google Scholar (https://scholar.google.com) or some of the fancy new AI-assisted literature survey tools such as Elicit (https://elicit.org). I used both to find these result:

- The effect of daily internet usage on a short attention span and academic performance (https://monami.hs-mittweida.de/frontdoor/deliver/index/docId...)

- Enhancing Cognitive Performance in Children by Decreasing Screen Time and Increasing Art Activities (https://www.proquest.com/openview/8f41dc5ed9fff23842acf88b16...)

- Gen Z and Millennials in the Workplace: How are Leaders Adapting to their Short Attention Span and How Will they Keep them from Leaving a Qualitative Study (https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/4800/)

- Does Media Use Have a Short-Term Impact on Cognitive Performance? (https://doi.org/10.1027/1864-1105%2Fa000038)

- Short-term mindfulness intervention reduces the negative attentional effects associated with heavy media multitasking (https://doi.org/10.1038/srep24542)

- Influence of Short Video Watching Behaviors on Visual Short-Term Memory (https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.211220.314)

- Attention switching and working memory spans (https://doi.org/10.1080/09541440440000014)

- Caught in the Loop: The Effects of The Addictive Nature Of Short-form videos On Users’ Perceived Attention Span And Mood (http://essay.utwente.nl/95551/)

Disclaimer: this is not my field, and I only spent 15 minutes on this, so these may not be the best articles around. On the other hand, the post seems to mention quite a lot of research on this topic, so you could read that, too. To read more, check articles that cite, or were cited by, these. Also, for obvious reasons, there does not seem to be many studies available on long term effects.

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Re:Have Attention Spans Been Declining? – Yes, 65% by throwaway2037 on Tuesday July 25, 2023 @11:58PM (#36872904)

Hot stuff. Great reply. Thank you for the scientific search tips!

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Re:Have Attention Spans Been Declining? – Yes, 65% by Spooky23 on Tuesday July 25, 2023 @12:48PM (#36865300)

I doubt there are controlled studies, but you can probably make a reasonable hypothesis based on viewing habits at different ages. Old people in 1993 watched Bonanza reruns; in 2023 they’re hooked to the constant crisis of cable news.

Anecdotally, I’ve definitely seen a shift in corporate comms as people gravitate to IM and text as opposed to email, driven both by habit and by avoiding accountability as email audit has become common.

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Re:Have Attention Spans Been Declining? – Yes, 65% by Aerbil313 on Tuesday July 25, 2023 @01:52PM (#36866475)

You can try yourself. Use the most short-form content media: either one of HN, reddit and tiktok for 8 hours per day for one week. I can guarantee you won’t be able to concencrate on anything after the one week.

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