SNAPlab

Have you heard about it? A goldfish has longer attention span than people! Our ability to focus has shrunk because of watching short videos. Besides other things it means that you will read only the first paragraph of my blog. So you won’t learn that the whole attention span crisis is nonsense and that our research article was accepted by Projections journal.

After several years of reading about the attention span crisis, I noticed an opposite trend this year. In March there was an article in the Financial Times disputing the shrinkage of our attention span. The author is even citing Gloria Mark:

The psychologist Gloria Mark, who is often quoted in relation to our degrading attention spans — and some of whose research landed us at this median number [47 seconds] — said on a podcast last year: “I don’t believe that our basic ability to pay attention has changed.”

For those of you who don’t know Gloria Mark’s name – her research is probably the reason why we thought there was a reason to believe that something is happening to our attention. However Gloria Mark was measuring how long it takes to switch between screens on your laptop when you are working. It is not really about attention, is it? I mean we could easily assume that when working on a Mac people would be switching more, because it is easier than on a PC. But it wouldn’t automatically mean that there is a causality between having a Mac and worse attention.

But even so, you might feel that your attention is worse than it was and that today’s kids’ attention is worse than that of kids decades ago. And exactly this feeling is the main reason we are talking about the attention crisis in the first place. According to article from Nature, no published data suggest something is happening to our ability to focus when we are not distracted. However, as the article stresses, the distractions are not always bad.

And distraction itself is not always the enemy. An important finding from controlled lab studies of attention is that even when volunteers have no external distractions, their minds still wander, often without conscious awareness that they have gone off task.

Esterman, who has spent years studying these fluctuations, argues that the flickering of attention must originate in the brain as useful internal processes that can distract us, including thoughts, ruminations and worries. Periods of mind-wandering can support creativity, planning and problem-solving, enabling the brain to explore and integrate ideas.

Now you might feel a little bit calmer about your attention. However, years of misinterpretations have brought us to a point where governments of Western countries are considering bans on social media for kids and bans on smartphones in schools. The technology is once again seen as the root of evil. This was the main topic of an online roundtable “Born Digital: Social Media, Screen‑Time, and the UK’s Public Consultation” organised by William Proctor. The discussion wasn’t about attention. It was rather about – according to panelists – baseless legislation, driven by moral panic about the new technology and scaremongering about the impact on children.

These three examples of course aren’t the first to raise doubts about our shrinking attention span and bad influence of technology. Today I bought a book Unlocked: The Real Science of Screen Time (and how to spend it better) written by psychologist Pete Etchells which is supposed to be sceptical about the bad influence of screens in 2024.

In this context I am happy to announce that this week an article I co-authored with Szonya Durant and Adam Ganz was accepted by the journal Projections. One part of the article discusses the null results from a correlation analysis we conducted. Among other things, we were interested in whether there is any relation between screen time on short video platforms (ranging between 0 and 4 hours a day) and four gaze metrics (fixation duration, length of horizontal saccades, proportion of vertical saccades, fixation entropy). And we found none. Despite a small number of participants and therefore being underpowered for small effects, I am really glad that publication of null results regarding screen time was supported by reviewers and editors of the journal.