Attention Span Has Correlation With Stress; People Tend To Make More Mistakes When Multitasking

A psychologist studied how digital media impacts our lives, including our focus. According to a new study, people only spend less than a minute before their attention wanders elsewhere.

People's Attention Spans Have Been Declining

Gloria Mark, a psychologist and professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, explored the influence of digital media in people's daily lives. She noticed that, on average, individuals only spend 47 seconds focusing on a given screen before switching to other tasks.

She said her attention span is declining, and she discussed reclaiming focus in her new book "Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity." The book is a culmination of her years of research on the subject.

She has been measuring attention spans since 2004 using objective and empirical methods to track how long people focus on any screen before they look away.

She told Newsweek that she has been using computer logging methods in the past decade, giving her precise timestamps of people's screentime. However, before this, they used to track people with stopwatches.

In 2004, the average time the participants focused on any screen was around two-and-half minutes. In 2012, it dropped to 75 seconds, and the results have declined over the years.

Mark said the trend of declining attention span has continued. In the last five years, people tend to only focus on one screen for an average of 47 seconds. According to her, others ended up with the same results, making her realize it was a serious issue.

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Stress, Internet, Technology, and More Affect Attention Span

According to Mark, there is a correlation between the frequency of attention switching and stress. She has tracked the participants' heart rates in the workplace to monitor their stress levels. According to her, one's blood pressure increases during attention-switching or multitasking.

She added that people are more likely to make mistakes when they switch attention between different tasks. The phenomenon is called "switch cost," which refers to the mental effort applied when reorienting the brain to the new activity.

Aside from stress, the other factors that played a part in the declining attention span are technology and the internet. She confirmed that notifications and targeted algorithms affect our attention.

Also, people sometimes self-interrupt. For instance, one may stop the report or presentation they are working on to check an email or make a phone call.

Also, the internet is another factor due to its "node and link" structure. The internet is designed to make it more convenient for users to find information through its network structure. Humans think in terms of association, and our memory is theorized to be structured as a semantic network.

For instance, when you visit Wikipedia, the articles there have many entry points, and since we think of associations, we tend to click on links, and before you know it, you have read a lot of things related or unrelated to the subject you initially searched for. You spend more time than you think because you are moving away from the subject.

Mark added that one's personality is another factor. Some individuals are better at regulating themselves than others. Those that score high on psychological measures of impulsivity and low on conscientiousness tend to have shorter attention spans.

Social media are also designed with a shorter time, constraining the length of content you can share. This is noticeable in videos posted on TikTok and Facebook's My Day.