I find little direct work on the topic, despite its wide appeal. Reviewing related research indicates that individual attention spans might indeed have been declining65%.
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.
“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?”
Did social media usage increase (my guess: yes90%), and if so, did attention spans decrease at the same time (or with a lag) (my guess: also yes75%), 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 find little direct work on the topic, despite its wide appeal. Reviewing related research indicates that individual attention spans might indeed have been declining65%.
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.
“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?”
Did social media usage increase (my guess: yes90%), and if so, did attention spans decrease at the same time (or with a lag) (my guess: also yes75%), 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).
