Attention Spans Aren't Shrinking - by Tommy Blanchard

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Attention Spans Aren't Shrinking<br>Attention researchers don't think attention is in decline

Tommy Blanchard<br>May 28, 2026

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Are our attention spans getting shorter? Certainly many people seem to think so. A UK survey found 49% of people think their attention span is shorter than it used to be (only 25% thought it was not). The headlines seem to agree: “TikToks, Shorts, and Reels Are Melting Your Attention Span, Study Finds”, claims a recent headline from Vice. “SHORT-FORM VIDEO IS REWIRING OUR BRAINS — AND THE DAMAGE IS WORSE THAN YOU THINK”, another article says.<br>The claims aren’t particularly new. In 2015, a Time article claimed “You Now Have a Shorter Attention Span Than a Goldfish”.

It’s a common belief that modern social media, short form content, and general “brain rot” of the modern age has led to the modern day populace being unable to pay attention. Yet if you talk to attention researchers, you get a different picture.<br>When asked if attentional skills have declined, Edward Vogel, professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Chicago, said: “I’ve been measuring college students for the past 20 years. It’s been remarkably stable across decades.”<br>The article quoting Vogen goes on:<br>His findings echo those of other experts, including Michael Posner, a psychologist known for identifying the brain networks underlying attention, and Marcus Raichle, a neurologist and authority on brain metabolism. They say the ability of healthy adults to pay attention hasn’t diminished.<br>“There is no real evidence that it’s changed since it was first reported in the late 1800s,” Dr. Posner said.

Similarly, in his book about screentime, Unlocked, psychology professor Pete Etchells asks two researchers whether they’ve seen any evidence of declining attention. Jacob Fisher says “I’ve yet to see anything that’s actually convincing.” Chris Chambers goes further:<br>It would be obvious if there was a decline. It would be easy to look at the last, say, fifteen years of research on attentional cueing and look at whether reorientation costs are getting higher. My virtually certain prediction is that you would get no effect whatsoever.

In fact, when I looked into it, the only study I could find that attempted what Chambers is describing found a modest increase in attention/concentration ability (more on that below).

Why might there be such a discrepancy between the general public’s perception of a decline in attention, and the researchers that study it? A clue comes from this article that quotes Gemma Briggs, yet another attention researcher who doesn’t think there’s a decline:<br>In fact, [attention researchers] think the idea that attention spans are getting shorter is plain wrong.<br>“I don’t think that’s true at all,” says Dr Gemma Briggs, a psychology lecturer at the Open University.<br>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.”

Briggs’s quote indicates the importance of what it is we’re doing. “Attention span” isn’t some simple quantifiable ability, it depends on “the task demand”. What it is we’re doing and the environment we’re doing it in affect how long we pay attention to it.<br>It’s possible we’re correctly inferring that it’s harder to pay attention for longer, but incorrect in attributing it to our diminished abilities. It might be that we have more vying for our attention.<br>We’ll come back to that. But first, let’s talk about the headlines pinning the blame here on our cognitive capacities being diminished due to phones and social media. With basically every news headline you see talking about a new study showing how scrambled our brains are, there are only two things you need to know to assess whether there’s anything to the study: short-term effects are not lasting deficits, and correlation is not causation.

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Short-Term Effects Are Not Lasting Deficits

Let’s look again at the Vice article I mentioned above: “TikToks, Shorts, and Reels Are Melting Your Attention Span, Study Finds”.<br>Sometimes you find articles where the headline is a bit over the top, but the substance of the article is much more even-keeled. This Vice article is not one of them. Here are a few choice quotes from the article:<br>It turns out “brain rot” isn’t just a cute little term to describe the current state of the internet.<br>Short-Form Video Is Wrecking Your Memory and Focus<br>short-form video, as a format, is essentially a less elegant version of the memory-wiping Neuralyzer from Men in Black

This is all bizarre if you actually read the two studies it’s based on.<br>The researchers had people perform a simple task: press ‘M’ on a keyboard if a nonword (like “batly”) is displayed, and press ‘N’ if a real word is displayed. Then, occasionally (about...