"Your Mystery: Have Attention Spans Been Declining?"

 From SlimeMoldTimeMold, July 24:

[This is one of the finalists in the SMTM Mysteries Contest, by a reader writing under the pseudonym Cennfaeladh. We’ll be posting about one of these a week until we have gotten through all the finalists. At the end, we’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked.]

I investigate whether the attention span of individual humans has been falling over the last two decades (prompted by curiosity about whether the introduction of the internet may be harmful to cognitive performance). I find little direct work on the topic, despite its wide appeal. Reviewing related research indicates that individual attention spans might indeed have been declining_65%.

In what might be just the age-old regular ephebiphobia, claims have been raised that individual attention spans have been declining—not just among adolescents, but among the general population. If so, this would be quite worrying: Much of the economy in industrialized societies is comprised of knowledge work, and knowledge work depends on attention to the task at hand: switching between tasks too often might prevent progress on complicated and difficult problems.

I became interested in the topic after seeing several claims that e.g. Generation Z allegedly has lower attention spans, observing myself and how I struggled to get any work done when connected to the internet, and hearing reports from others online and in person having the same problem.

The exact question being asked is:

“Have the attention spans of individuals on neutral tasks (that is, tasks that are not specifically intended to be stimulating) declined from 2000 to the present?”

(One might also formulate it as “Is there an equivalent of the “Reversed Flynn Effect” for attention span?”) I am not particularly wedded to the specific timeframe, though the worries mentioned above assert that this has become most stark during the last decade or so, attributing the change to widespread social media/smartphone/internet usage. Data from before 2000 or just the aughts would be less interesting. The near-global COVID-19 lockdows could provide an especially enlightening natural experiment: Did social media usage increase (my guess: yes_90%), and if so, did attention spans decrease at the same time (or with a lag) (my guess: also yes_75%), but I don’t think anyone has the data on that and wants to share it.

Ideally want to have experiments from ~2000 up to 2019: close enough to the present to see whether there is a downward trend (a bit more than a decade after the introduction of the iPhone in 2007), but before the COVID-19 pandemic which might be a huge confounder, or just have accelerated existing trends (which we can probably check in another 2 years).

I am mostly interested in the attention span of individual humans and not groups: Lorenz-Spreen et al. 2019 investigate the development of a construct they call “collective attention” (and indeed find a decline), but that seems less economically relevant than individual attention span. I am also far less interested in self-perception of attention span, give me data from a proper power- or speed-test, cowards!

So the question I am asking is not any of the following:

• “Does more social media/internet usage cause decreased attention spans?”
• “Does more social media/internet usage correlate with decreased attention spans?”
• “Does more social media/internet usage correlate with people reporting having shorter attention spans?”
• “Did collective attention spans decrease?”
• “Are people on average spending less time on webpages than they used to?”

How Is Attention Span Defined?

Attention is generally divided into three distinct categories: sustained attention, which is the consistent focus on a specific task or piece of information over time (Wikipedia states that the span for sustained attention has a leprechaun figure of 10 minutes floating around, elaborated on in Wilson & Korn 2007); selective attention, which is the ability to resist distractions while focusing on important information while performing on a task (the thing trained during mindfulness meditation); and alternating or divided attention, also known as the ability to multitask.

When asking the question “have attention spans been declining”, we’d ideally want the same test measuring all those three aspects of attention (and not just asking people about their perception via surveys), performed annually on large random samples of humans over decades, ideally with additional information such as age, sex, intelligence (or alternatively educational attainment), occupation etc. I’m personally most interested in the development of sustained attention, and less so in the development of selective attention. But I have not been able to find such research, and in fact there is apparently no agreed upon test for measuring attention span in the first place:

She studies attention in drivers and witnesses to crime and says the idea of an “average attention span” is pretty meaningless. “It’s very much task-dependent. How much attention we apply to a task will vary depending on what the task demand is.”

— Simon Maybin quoting Dr. Gemma Briggs, “Busting the attention span myth”, 2017

So, similar to comas, attention span doesn’t exist…sure, super-proton things come in varieties, but which varieties?? And how??? Goddamn, psychologists, do your job and don’t just worship complexity....

....MUCH MORE