microsoft attention spans research report.pdf

Neuroscience

You Now Have a Shorter Attention Span Than a Goldfish

T he average attention span for the notoriously ill-focused goldfish is nine seconds, but according to a new study from Microsoft Corp., people now generally lose concentration after eight seconds, highlighting the affects of an increasingly digitalized lifestyle on the brain.

Researchers in Canada surveyed 2,000 participants and studied the brain activity of 112 others using electroencephalograms (EEGs). Microsoft found that since the year 2000 (or about when the mobile revolution began) the average attention span dropped from 12 seconds to eight seconds.

“Heavy multi-screeners find it difficult to filter out irrelevant stimuli — they’re more easily distracted by multiple streams of media,” the report read.

On the positive side, the report says our ability to multitask has drastically improved in the mobile age.

Microsoft theorized that the changes were a result of the brain’s ability to adapt and change itself over time and a weaker attention span may be a side effect of evolving to a mobile Internet.

The survey also confirmed generational differences for mobile use; for example, 77% of people aged 18 to 24 responded “yes” when asked, “When nothing is occupying my attention, the first thing I do is reach for my phone,” compared with only 10% of those over the age of 65.

And now congratulate yourself for concentrating long enough to make it through this article.

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microsoft attention spans research report.pdf

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Microsoft attention-spans-research-report

Digital lifestyles are negatively impacting Canadians' ability to focus for prolonged periods. Heavy media consumption, social media usage, frequent multi-screening, and early technology adoption are correlated with poorer sustained attention. However, these groups have more frequent short bursts of high attention and encode information more efficiently. Their brains have adapted to processing information in shorter bursts. Marketers need to grab attention quickly before consumers switch tasks. Read less

How can we help you?

Attention and the 8-second attention span.

Debunking The 8-Second Attention Span

In 2015, Microsoft published a study with an infographic that shows our attention span at 12 seconds in the year 2000 and 8 seconds in 2013. It also shows the attention span of a goldfish at 9 seconds. (?) They attribute these numbers to Statistic Brain .

I searched for these numbers on Statistic Brain and they cite a 2008 study by Weinreich, Obendorf, Herder, and Mayer which explores the results of a web browsing study. They also cite information from "National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine, The Associated Press”.

The Weinreich, Obendorf, Herder, and Mayer study does not cite the listed statistics. An article in Policy Viz tracked the second source and found no relevant data. So… where do these numbers come from?

The numbers appear to be fiction! That would seem bizarre, except it’s not the first time a series of numbers needed to be debunked (We remember 10% of what we read 20% of what we hear…). That infographic got a lot of attention from news outlets. Time Magazine, USA Today, The New York Times, and Canada’s National Post (and others) all wrote about the 8-second attention span without giving much thought to whether it made sense. And speakers and marketers still cite these fictional numbers to justify your need to buy their help and solutions. What’s even more bizarre is that the Microsoft study wasn’t really about attention span. It was about helping advertisers get eyeballs.

Other research shows support for a variable attention span far longer than 8 seconds and dependent on many factors (as we would expect). Think about your own attention span. Can you pay attention for 2 hours? When? (Obvious answer: Watching a movie.) When can you pay attention for half an hour or more? Often. Examples: Talking to friends, playing games on your phone, reading, etc.

For example, Wilson and Korn did a literature review (an analysis of what the research says about a specific topic) and discussed the many flaws in much of the research on attention span during lectures. They said that one of the few things that we can say is that attention span varies and it was impossible to offer a specific estimate for a how long people can pay attention. (My reaction: Duh.)

The teeny tiny attention argument seems to be part of a larger digital native argument, which says that technology has changed how younger people learn so we much teach them differently. Also fiction. I discussed the problems with this argument in another article .

What Is Attention?

We know that attention is critical for learning. I’ve discussed memory in previous articles and memory and attention are related. We can’t remember or process information that we don’t attend to. Some say attention is the ability to focus on one thing and not become distracted by other things in the environment. But that’s just one a part of attention.

The Microsoft study cited Sohlberg and Mateer’s Attention Model , which Sohlberg and Mateer developed for clinical use (brain damage, ADD, etc.). The model has 5 levels:


1. Focused Attention (easiest level)	Response to external stimuli. Example: Reacting when touched.
2. Sustained Attention	Ongoing focus to carry out repetitive tasks. Example: Remembering instructions and carrying them out when needed.
3. Selective Attention	Staying focused while distractions are present. Example: Performing tasks while there are distractions, such as noise and movement.
4. Alternating Attention	Shifting focus between tasks that need different skills. Example: Alternating between asking questions, listening for the answers, and typing in facts on a form
5. Divided Attention (most difficult level)	Responding simultaneously to multiple tasks. (May be rapid switching of alternating attention.) Example: Talking on the phone while sending an email.

Table 1. Sohlberg and Mateer Attention Model (adapted from Sohlberg & Mateer reference).

Our brain also does a lot of preprocessing that we are unaware of. This is where the brain is deciding if there is anything needing attention. The world around us bombards us with stimuli that could overwhelm us on an ongoing basis. So, our brain must be able to filter most of this out so we are not overloaded. We cannot learn or react while overloaded.

The brain decides we need to pay attention primarily when there is something new or changing. When nothing has changed and things are normal, it tends to coast on autopilot. Most of us have had the experience of driving somewhere and not remembering actually getting there.

In addition to levels of attention, Chun, Golumb, and Turk-Browne describe 2 types of attention: External and internal.

External attention refers to how we select and process information through our senses from the world.
Internal attention refers to how we select and process information from inside, such as memory and feelings.

Learning and application of what we learn involves both types of attention. For example, in effective learning environments, we are processing information from outside (for example, what someone is saying and images we see) using working memory and linking what we are processing to information we are processing from the inside (including thoughts, feelings, and what we already know). When we are remembering what we learned to apply it, we need to retrieve information from long-term memory and use that while handling new information from the environment.

Attention is complex. There is no set attention span. So, there’s no need to design for a known tiny attention span. But there is a need to gain and keep attention during learning because there are internal and external things competing for attention all the time.

We can use Sohlberg and Mateer’s levels of attention to analyze what level of attention a worker needs for various job tasks. As the attentional levels get more complex, we can consider how it might be possible to support memory and attention to make the work less difficult.

In a previous article , I discussed how we need to analyze what is causing various performance problems rather than assuming that training will solve all problems. When analyzing processes where there are less-than-desirable outcomes, we can look for attentional difficulties. For example, are we expecting people to do many things at once (level 5) or do things in situations where there are a lot of distractions (level 3)? Can situations that cause attention problems be improved?

Next month, I’ll follow up on this article by discussing a situation where technology is problematically impacting attention. I’ll also discuss what designing for attention looks like. If you have specific questions, please post them as your questions impact what I write about.

References :

Chun, M. M., Golumb, J. D., & Turk-Browne, N.B. (2011). A Taxonomy of External and Internal Attention . The Annual Review of Psychology. 62, p 73–101.
Colgrass, N. (May 14, 2015). Our attention span now worse than goldfish's . USA Today.
Eagen, T. (January 22, 2016). The Eight-Second Attention Span . The New York Times.
Gagné, R. (1985). The Conditions of Learning and the Theory of Instruction (4th ed.). New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.
Gausby, A. (Spring 2015). Attention Spans (Download PDF). Microsoft Canada.
McSpadden, K. (May 14, 2015). You Now Have a Shorter Attention Span Than a Goldfish . Time Magazine.
Pashler, H. (1998). The psychology of attention . Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.
Pilieci, V. (May 12, 2015). Canadians now have shorter attention span than goldfish thanks to portable devices: Microsoft study . National Post.
Policy Viz. (January 29, 2016). The Attention Span Statistic Fallacy .
Shank, P. (Thursday, October 27, 2016). What Do You Know: Should We Train “Digital Natives” Differently? ATD Science of Learning Blog.
Sohlberg, M. M. & Mateer, C. A. (2001). Improving attention and managing attentional problems: Adapting rehabilitation techniques to adults with ADD . Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 931, pp 359-75.
Statistic Brain, Attention span
Weinreich, H., Obendorf, H., Herder, E. &, Mayer, M. (February 2008). Not Quite the Average: An Empirical Study of Web Use. ACM Transactions on the Web, 2 (1), article #5.
Wilson, K. Korn & J. H. (). Attention During Lectures: Beyond Ten Minutes . Teaching of Psychology, v34 n2 p85-89 2007.
A Deep Dive Into The Shrinking Attention Span
8 Reasons Why Your Online Training Course Breaks The 8-Second Attention Span Rule
10 Ways To Use Microlearning To Make Your Corporate Training More Effective
Learners' Problems Technology Can Solve

A review of the trend of microlearning

Journal of Work-Applied Management

ISSN : 2205-2062

Article publication date: 17 December 2020

Issue publication date: 26 April 2021

Microlearning has been considered as a promising topic in work-based learning. This paper aims to review the trends of microlearning in terms of related publications and Internet searches. Hopefully, the findings can serve as a reference for the education sector, government, business and academia to promote, design and use microlearning.

Design/methodology/approach

In this study, two sets of analysis were conducted. Firstly, the authors analysed the publication trend of microlearning. Second, the authors analysed the trend of Internet searches related to microlearning. More specifically, the authors analysed real-world data of 14 years obtained from Scopus and Google Trends for the purpose. These data include the first relevant publication found in the database.

In total, 476 relevant publications have been identified during 2006–2019. According to the findings from the analysis of the identified publications, microlearning is a relevantly new and emerging global topic involving authors, affiliations and funding sponsors from different countries. Moreover, many microlearning-related publications were conducted from perspectives of e-learning or mobile learning. Furthermore, the authors notice higher education was the most frequently mentioned education level in the identified publications. On the other hand, language learning (i.e. second language, vocabulary learning, etc.) had been mentioned more times in the titles and abstracts than other subject areas. Overall, the increasing trend of publications on “microlearning” (as a knowledge supply) is in line with the established increasing Internet searches of “microlearning” (as a practical demand) in recent years.

Practical implications

From the work-based learning perspective, microlearning has been considered as one of the key topics in talent development topics. Policymakers, educators, researchers and participators have the responsibility to explore how to promote, design and use microlearning to help people to learn in the right direction through valid knowledge with ethical consideration.

Originality/value

Although many works had been done on microlearning, there is a lack of comprehensive studies reviewing the trends of microlearning in terms of related publications and Internet searches. This study aims to fill this gap by analysing real-world data obtained from Scopus and Google Trends – these data include the first relevant publication found in the database. The authors believe this is the first time that a study has been conducted to comprehensively review the development trends of microlearning. Hopefully, this study can shed some light on related research.

Microlearning
Work-based learning

Leong, K. , Sung, A. , Au, D. and Blanchard, C. (2021), "A review of the trend of microlearning", Journal of Work-Applied Management , Vol. 13 No. 1, pp. 88-102. https://doi.org/10.1108/JWAM-10-2020-0044

Emerald Publishing Limited

Published by Emerald Publishing Limited. This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode

1. Introduction

In recent years, microlearning has been considered as a promising topic in work-based learning. This paper aims to review the trends of microlearning in terms of related publications and Internet searches. The findings can serve as a reference for the education sector, government and academia to promote, design and use microlearning. Although there are many concepts and versions of microlearning ( Hug, 2005 ), the common features of microlearning, as per Buchem and Hamelmann (2010) , include microcontent, focussing on a single definable idea or topic and short learning time (i.e. no longer than 15 min).

In brief, the key benefits of using microlearning include (1) better retention of concepts ( Giurgiu, 2017 ; Shail, 2019 ), (2) better engagement for learners ( De Gagne et al. , 2019a , b ; Nikou, 2019 ; Liao and Zhu, 2012 ), (3) improving learners' motivation ( Nikou and Economdies, 2018 ; Halbach and Solheim, 2018 ; Shail, 2019 ; Stronck, 1983 ), (4) engaging in collaborative learning ( Reinhardt and Elwood, 2019 ; Zhang and Ren, 2011 ; Chang and Liu, 2015 ) and (5) improving learning ability and performance ( Mohammed et al. , 2018 ; Jomah et al. , 2016 ).

Big data plays an important role in the development of microlearning. In the age of big data, human's attention span is decreasing. As per Hebert (1971) , “ what information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it ” (p. 41). An example of short attention span in the age of big data can be found in the music industry, as per ( Gauvin, 2017 ), the average time that passed before the audience would hear the vocals on any radio song was 23 s, today the average intro is just 5 s long. Wertz (2017) also suggested that 40% of users are likely to abandon a website if it does not load within three seconds or less. Furthermore, a survey ( Gausby, 2015 ) conducted by Microsoft indicated that the average attention span of a human dropped from 12 to eight seconds, which means shorter than a goldfish. Given the average human attention span is decreasing, microlearning becomes more and more important because it emphasises short learning duration.

On the other hand, as per Wertz (2018 ), instant gratification has become an expectation since the emergence of the Internet and the immense growth of social media in the big data age. This expectation also affects how people view their time and how they learn. In comparison to the traditional approach that face-to-face study times are scheduled, it is now people expect to learn instantly anytime, anywhere. In the workplace, people are used to have information at their fingertips, finding the answers they need within minutes. This has dramatically changed people's expectations of workplace learning. Also, more and more employees are preferred to taking control of their own learning. A previous survey ( Mazareanu, 2019 ) suggests that 80% of employees are learning when they need it. Accordingly, the need for on-demand training or just-in-time learning is growing ( Brandenburg and Ellinger, 2003 ). This trend also facilitates the development of microlearning. As per Gabrielli et al. (2006) , small chunks of the learning content can enable learners to access them more easily in specific moments and conditions of the day.

In fact, the applications of microlearning have been widely studied in different fields, such as in textiles ( Buhu and Buhu, 2019 ), health professional education ( De Gagne et al. , 2019a , b ), engineering ( Said and Çavuş, 2018 ), language learning ( Edge et al. , 2011 ) and college physical education ( Zhang and Zhang, 2017 ). Moreover, as per Florida (2002) ; Ogata and Yano (2003 ), microlearning is a research area that aims to explore new ways of responding to the growing need for lifelong learning or learning demand of knowledge workers. A similar view can also be found in other studies, such as Jomah et al. (2016) .

From the work-based learning perspective, microlearning has been considered as one of the key topics in talent development ( Moore, 2017 ). According to Emerson and Berge (2018 ), microlearning can facilitate knowledge acquisition in the workplace by engaging and motivating employees to communicate and apply what they have learned. On the other hand, Overton (2011) indicated that managers prefer on-demand learning and access to up-to-date information in a timely manner under the current competitive business environment. Madden and Govender (2020) further suggested that the learning and development departments of businesses are focussing on the emerging concept of microlearning to support the fast-paced, multitask-orientated and digitally savvy learners. Furthermore, Hesse et al. (2019) concluded that microlearning is effective at increasing the feelings of confidence and accuracy in the work of dairy personnel. In brief, we suggest that work-based learning needs digital transformations in order to meet today's fast-changing business environment in the big data age. This suggestion is similar to the viewpoints from Downes (2005) ; Chisholm (2005 ), they summarised that renewed and innovative ways of work-based learnings are required according to the ways we live, work and learn today.

Although many works have been done on microlearning, there is a lack of comprehensive studies reviewing the trends of microlearning in terms of related publications and Internet searches. This study aims to fill this gap by analysing real-world data obtained from Scopus and Google Trends – these data include the first relevant publication found in the database. Therefore, an extensive reading list with a good range of dates will be summarised in this paper.

The rest of this paper is organised as follows: we first explain the research designs and report the findings in the next section. Given we are reviewing two different trends (i.e. publications and Internet searches) based on two different data sets; therefore, the Research Design and Findings section is divided into two parts, respectively. Finally, discussion and suggestions are provided in the Conclusion section.

2. Research design and findings

In this study, two sets of analysis were conducted. Firstly, we analysed the publication trend of microlearning. Second, we analysed the trend of Internet searches related to microlearning.

In both analyses, we also explored the entire population of corresponding data sources. For the publication trend of microlearning, the data source refers to all the microlearning-related literature reviews in the Scopus database since the year 2006. For the trend of Internet searches related to microlearning, the data source refers to all the search activities in Google that relate to microlearning since the year 2006. Both analyses were started from 2006 because we found the first relevant publication in the Scopus database in this year. Although it is not possible to make statistical generalisations about the sample being studied, we can make analytical generalisations about the trends of microlearning by exploring the entire data sources. More specifically, this study can provide a comprehensive whole picture about the trends of microlearning in terms of related publications and Internet searches during the study period (i.e. 2006–2019). We also presented the corresponding trends of (1) e-learning and (2) learning for the comparison purpose. These two trends can be considered because microlearning is under the disciplines of e-learning and learning. More detail explanations about the analysis approaches are provided in the following sections.

2.1 Research design

2.1.1 publication trends of microlearning.

In order to understand the publication trend, data were collected from Scopus. Scopus ( https://www.scopus.com/ ) is an abstract and citation database that covers nearly 36,377 titles (22,794 active and 13,583 inactive titles) from approximately 11,678 publishers, of which 34,346 are peer-reviewed journals in various subject fields.

Thenumber of related publications over time

Distribution of authors by countries

Distribution of affiliations

Funding sponsors

Source types of publication

Word frequency analysis I: based on the titles

Word frequency analysis II: based on the abstracts

These seven perspectives are selected because we aim to include as many possible perspectives as in this study in order to provide more comprehensive and diverse views on the publication trends. In this regard, the seven selected perspectives were the most accessible types of information that the database (i.e. Scopus) can generate for the purpose. Given the approach being used in this study is directly repeatable; therefore, the findings are transparent and reproducible. As per the considerations suggested by Fisch and Block (2018) , transparent and reproducible are two key features of the systematic literature review in business and management research. Moreover, similar approach has been applied in other studies, such as Wang and Chen (2010) ; Liao et al. (2017) ; White and McCain (1998 ).

2.1.2 Internet searches related to microlearning

In addition to analysing publication trends, we also conducted an Internet search analysis that could generate understanding on trends of information needs on related knowledge. In other words, we conducted the Internet search analysis with the aim to obtain an additional view in terms of how public interests on microlearning were changing during the period. The findings from the Internet search analysis can then serve as a reference for policymakers because the findings reflect the market needs.

In this study, we used a public-accessible online tool, Google Trends ( www.google.com/trends/ ) to analyse the Internet searching trends of “microlearning”. In addition, two related search terms, “elearning” and “learning”, were also be used for the comparison purpose. A search term is a keyword that a user enters in the Google search engine to satisfy his or her information needs.

Google Trends is a free public web service developed by Google. It shows how often specific search terms have been queried over a specific period. In other words, Google Trends is a platform that summarises the popularity of top search queries in Google.

The data from Google Trends have widely been used by researchers for analysing human behaviour and user interests across various fields ( Jun et al. , 2018 ). One of the notable examples is that Ginsberg et al. (2009) published their findings in Nature and reported that they successfully used the data from Google Trends to predict the spread of influenza epidemics – even earlier than the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Other examples include, to name a few, Choi and Varian (2012) demonstrated how to use search engine data on Google to forecast near-term values of economic indicators, such as unemployment claims, consumer confidence, etc. Sung et al. (2020) studied the relationships between Google search activities and the finance education trend. The works of Durmusoglu (2017) demonstrated the uses of Google Trends data to assess public understanding of the environmental risks.

In this analysis, (1st January 2006 to 31st December 2019) search terms (i.e. keywords) data of 14 years were collected from Google Trends. This selected period is in line with the analysing period of publication conducted above, that is, from the first relevant publication found. The data collected refer to the search behaviour of Google search engine users, that is, what these users are looking for over a specified period. Moreover, we set the geographical location criterion in the Google Trends as “worldwide”; therefore, the results represent user behaviours from all over the world instead of any specific geographical location.

2.2 Findings

In this section, we shall report the findings of our analyses. These findings provide a comprehensive picture from different perspectives on the global trends of microlearning. Further discussions will be provided in the Conclusion section on the importance of microlearning in work-based learning.

2.2.1 Findings on analysing publication trends of microlearning

2.2.1.1 the number of related publications over time.

By searching publications containing the term “microlearning” in all selected fields (i.e. article title, abstract, keywords, authors, source title, affiliation and funding information) in Scopus, we identified 476 related publications in total, including the first publication found in 2006. Moreover, as per Figure 1 , an increasing trend from 2016 to 2019 is found.

We further evaluated the publications containing the terms “elearning” and “learning” in Scopus for the same period (i.e. from 2016 to 2019). Both Figures 2 and 3 show similar increasing trends, although the increasing rates of the related publications were not as high as “microlearning”. More specifically, the number of publications related to “microlearning” has increased 47 times (i.e. from 2 to 94) from 2006 to 2019; however, numbers of publications related to “elearning” and “learning” have increased only 4.45 and 4.11 times, respectively, during the same period.

2.2.1.2 Distribution of authors by countries

The identified publications containing “microlearning” were contributed by scholars from 75 countries. Table 1 summarises the countries having ten or more publications during the period, for example, the table shows that 78 (i.e. 16.4%) publications involved scholars from the USA, this participation rate is the highest amongst all the countries.

2.2.1.3 Distribution of affiliations

As per Table 2 , in total, 15 affiliations from different countries were involved in five or more publications during the period and the Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands, was ranked to the top, followed by the University of Glasgow, the UK.

2.2.1.4 Funding sponsors

In total, 69 (14.5%) publications were funded by 51 identified sponsors, in which six of the identified sponsors involved two or more publications, as per Table 3 .

Overall, Tables 1 – 3 provide evidence that microlearning is a global topic. In summary, as per the findings, microlearning had become a global topic that involved researchers' contributions from different countries and affiliations. In addition, the topic had also successfully attracted funding from sponsors globally. In fact, we observed that many publications involved cross affiliations and cross-countries collaborations. These findings could provide an empirical reference to support future collaborative research directions.

2.2.1.5 Source types of publication

Table 4 and Figure 4 demonstrate that conference proceeding was the key source type of “microlearning”-related publication. Overall, 41% of the works were published as conference proceeding, 34% were published in journals. Table 4 , Figure 5 and Figure 6 further show the distributions of source type of “elearning” and “learning”, respectively.

As per the figures, conference proceeding was the major source type of publication for “microlearning”, whereas journal was the major source type of publication for “elearning” and “learning”. We consider this finding reflecting that “microlearning” was a relatively new topic. This consideration is based on the general difference between conference proceeding and journal. In brief, a conference proceedings article is published in the proceedings of a conference, and it usually reflects an earlier-term research work (preliminary findings) or an innovative idea that has emerged in course of the research study. On the other hand, a journal paper tends to be a more comprehensive and in-depth research than a conference proceeding.

2.2.1.6 Word frequency analysis I: based on the titles

Given a title can be used to identify the main idea, work and the context of a publication, it also conveys a minimal summary of a publication's content; therefore, the frequency words found in the titles of the identified publications can indicate the trends of related research in the field of “microlearning”.

We conducted this analysis at different levels (i.e. from a single word to two-word phrases). Table 5 shows the top ten most frequent single words found in the titles.

On top of reviewing single word in a title, we further extended the word frequency analysis to the two-word phrase level in order to obtain a more comprehensive view.

Table 6 shows the top ten most frequent two-word phrases found in the titles. More specifically, 11 phrases are listed in the table because four phrases are having the same counts. In the table, the phrases without meanings were excluded, such as “in the”, “of the” and “in higher”.

We did not extend the analysis to three-word phrases because only two three-word phrases (i.e. “in higher education” and “a case study”) had ten or more counts, that is, the results are not representative.

In brief, according to the findings, the words or phrases related to e-learning or mobile learning (e.g. mobile, mobile learning and e-learning) are often found in the titles. Also, “language” is a frequently mentioned topic in the titles as well.

2.2.1.7 Word frequency analysis II: based on the abstracts

An abstract is a brief summary of a publication. Tables 7 – 9 show the top ten most frequent single words, two- and three-word phrases found in the abstracts, respectively. Similar to word frequency analysis I above, the phrases without meanings, such as “in the”, “the results of”, “this paper presents” or similar phrases were excluded.

In brief, similar to the findings in the titles, the words or phrases related to e-learning or mobile learning (e.g. mobile, mobile learning and e-learning) are often found in the abstracts. Moreover, higher education is the most frequently mentioned education level in the abstracts.

2.2.2 Findings on analysing Internet searches related to microlearning

Figures 7–9 demonstrate the “search volume indexes” (from 1st January 2006 to 31st December 2019) of the terms “microlearning”, “elearning” and “learning”, respectively. For these Figures, the horizontal axis represents time and the number at the vertical axis is the “search volume index”. The index represents search interest relative to the highest point on the chart and time (i.e. from 1st January 2006 to 31st December 2019 in this study). A value of 100 is the peak popularity for the term, while a score of 0 means there was not any search for the term.

As per Figure 7 , the search activities of the term “microlearning” fluctuate significantly during 2006–2010. It holds steady at a relatively low level from 2010 to 2015 and then an increasing trend is shown since 2015.

On the other hand, as per Figure 8 , an increasing trend is found for the search term “elearning”. In contrast, the trend line “learning” ( Figure 9 ) illustrates a slightly decreasing trend from left- (earlier in terms of timeline) to right-hand sides (more recent in terms of timeline) that means the overall search volume of term “learning” was decreasing during the same period.

Given previous studies have found a strong association between online searching behaviour and public interests on various social topics in the real world, such as flu prevention ( Ginsberg et al. , 2009 ), investor attention and initial public offering (IPO) anomalies ( Song et al. , 2011 ) and forecasting of cinema visits ( Hand and Judge, 2012 ). Therefore, we suggest the increasing trend of the searching pattern of “microlearning” since 2015, as per Figure 7 , reflects the growing interests in microlearning.

3. Conclusion

In this paper, we analysed real-world data of 14 years obtained from Scopus and Google Trends for the purpose. These data include the first relevant publication found in the database.

According to the findings from analysing the identified publications, microlearning is a relatively new and emerging global topic involving authors, affiliations and funding sponsors from different countries. On the other hand, the Internet searches of microlearning also increased during the period. Therefore, according to the findings of publication trends and Internet searches, we suggest that the microlearning could mature and develop into a critical mainstream issue in the future or become a major trend in its own right. As a result, researchers in the field should consider microlearning as a promising research direction. In addition, policymakers, funding sponsors and affiliations should consider to encourage research in microlearning-related topics as per the identified trends. Moreover, as per the results from the two “word frequency analyses”, many microlearning-related publications were conducted from perspectives of e-learning or mobile learning. This reflects technologies, particularly mobile technologies, playing an important role in the development of microlearning. Furthermore, we notice higher education was the most frequently mentioned education level in the identified publications. This could be explained by the different practices between higher education and lower levels of educations, more specifically, compared with lower levels of education, higher education students are more self-initiative, they need to identify their own needs and have to be responsible for own goals and progress, which is more suitable for using microlearning than lower-level educations by nature. On the other hand, language learning (i.e. second language and vocabulary learning) had been mentioned more times in the titles and abstracts than other subject areas. Overall, the increasing trend of publications on “microlearning” (as a knowledge supply) is in line with the established increasing Internet searches of “microlearning” (as a practical demand) in recent years.

As future works, cross-disciplinary research studies can help establish a more comprehensive theoretical framework for creating better understanding on how to effectively apply microlearning to support workplace learning and higher education in practice. Moreover, policymakers should reflect on how to promote, design and use microlearning to prepare people for digital transformation in the fast-changing world. Furthermore, given microlearning also plays an important role in self-learning, policymakers, educators, researchers and participators have the responsibility to explore how to promote, design and use microlearning to help work-based learners to learn in a right direction through valid knowledge ethically.

In summary, microlearning enables work-based learners to gain new knowledge or skills just in time to meet their immediate needs in this fast-changing world; in addition, microlearning can also help work-based learners to achieve a specific, actionable task. These benefits make microlearning in a work context particularly valuable. Moreover, many work-based learners who are constantly busy and have only limited time to learn new skills or refresh their memory in today's highly competitive business environment can efficiently utilise microlearning. As a result, we suggest that microlearning will become an even more important work-based learning topic in foreseeable future. We believe this is the first time that a study has been conducted to comprehensively review the development trends of microlearning. Hopefully, this study can shed some light on related research.

Thenumber of publications (microlearning) from 2006 to 2019

Thenumber of publications (e-learning) from 2006 to 2019

Thenumber of publications (learning) from 2006 to 2019

Distributions of the source type (microlearning)

Distributions of the source type (e-learning)

Distributions of the source type (learning)

Thesearching trend of the term “microlearning” from January 2006 to December 2019

Thesearching trend of the term “elearning” from January 2006 to December 2019

Thesearching trend of the term “learning” from January 2006 to December 2019

Counts of contributions by countries

Country	Counts of contribution
The USA	78
Germany	57
China	32
The UK	30
Austria	29
Italy	28
Australia	25
Spain	22
The Netherlands	18
Canada	14
Japan	14
Greece	13
Slovakia	13
Finland	11
Portugal	11
South Korea	11
The Czech Republic	10
France	10

Counts of affiliations

Affiliation	Country	Counts
The Delft University of technology	The Netherlands	10
The University of Glasgow	The UK	8
Ionian Panepistimion	Greece	7
Ostravská Univerzita v Ostrave	The Czech Republic	7
Suleyman Demirel University, Kaskelen	Kazakhstan	7
Comenius University	Slovakia	6
Universitat Oberta de Catalunya	Spain	6
Norges Teknisk-Naturvitenskapelige Universitet	Norway	6
Universität Duisburg-Essen	Germany	6
Universität Stuttgart	Germany	6
Università della Calabria	Italy	6
Technische Universitat Graz	Austria	5
Università degli Studi di Firenze	Italy	5
Tallinn University	Estonia	5
Itä-Suomen yliopisto	Finland	5

Counts of funding sponsors

Funding sponsor	Counts
The European Commission (EU)	10
The National Natural Science Foundation of China (China)	5
The Cultural and Educational Grant Agency (Slovakia)	3
The Federal Ministry of Education and Research (German)	2
The Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (Japan)	2
The National Science Foundation (USA)	2

Counts of the source type

Source type	Microlearning	E-learning	Learning
Journal	160	10,531	2,121,602
Conference proceeding	193	9,599	729,932
Book	68	2,652	240,308
Book series	54	1,687	197,407
Trade journal	1	43	5,111
Others	0	3	393

Top ten most frequent single words found in the titles

Rank	Single word	Counts
1	Learning	248
2	Mobile	105
3	Education	60
4	Microlearning	50
5	Based	44
6	Design	36
7	Micro	32
8	Language	31
8	Study	31
10	Social	30

Top ten most frequent two-word phrases found in the titles

Rank	Two-word phrase	Counts
1	Mobile learning	34
2	E-learning	30
3	Higher education	24
4	Microlearning	23
5	Case study	15
6	Learning environments	14
7	Language learning	13
8–10	Design of	9
8–10	Development of	9
8–10	Second language	9
8–10	Vocabulary learning	9

Top ten most frequent single words found in the abstracts

Rank	Single word	Counts
1	Learning	1,477
2	Mobile	414
3	Students	371
4	Paper	290
5	Education	286
6	Study	249
7	Based	248
8	Research	245
8	Use	240
10	Design	207

Top ten most frequent two-word phrases found in the abstracts

Rank	Two-word phrase	Counts
1	Mobile learning	138
2	E-learning	105
3	Microlearning	92
4	Higher education	72
5	Mobile devices	68
6	Development of	55
7	Language learning	43
8	Web 2	39
8	Learning environment	39
10	M-learning	37

Top ten most frequent three-word phrases found in the abstracts

Rank	Three-word phrase	Counts
1	Teaching and learning	40
2	In higher education	31
2	The development of	31
4	Of e-learning	29
5	Of mobile learning	24
6	The effectiveness of	22
6	The design of	22
8	Use of mobile	20
9	Of mobile devices	18
10	Of higher education	16

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8-Second Attention Spans: Tracking the myth that just won’t quit

Well, I guess you won’t be reading to the end of this article; because — as TIME put it — “ You Now Have a Shorter Attention Span Than a Goldfish .”

Sensationalism

The many sensationalist reports — including those from USA Today , the National Post , the New York Times , and Guardian — and seen in many articles, books, infographics, seminars, etc., all basically say the same thing: A 2015 study from Microsoft Canada found that people’s attention spans have gone from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds in 2013, while goldfish have 9-second attention spans.

This infographic (pictured above) — taken straight from the report — is responsible for a lot of nonsense.

Cause for confusion

While Microsoft is an impressive citation, this “attention span” claim never actually came from their research. As you can see in the bottom-left corner of the screenshot, the source says ”Statistic brain.” That’s the Statistic Brain Research Institute; but when you go down the rabbit-hole of their references, you find two sources they cite:

First is the aggregation of a few sources: “National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine, The Associated Press,” which is not actually a proper citation at all. When requested for confirmation on these claims, these organizations are always saying they can’t verify the claims , wondering why they were even referenced.
The other source is a legitimate study from 2008 (described in the following section). However, if they’re citing a study from 2008, where did the 2013 comparison come from? Unsurprisingly, Statistic Brain never responded to Simon Maybin from the BBC when he reached out for comment back in 2017, and they never responded or made a public statement about it.

Searching for Goldfish

The 2008 study.

The perfectly legitimate 25-participant study in question — Not quite the average: An empirical study of Web use (2008) — investigates how our Internet-related behaviour has changed since the early days of static websites to dynamic web apps with complex interactions. It largely focuses on our use of the back button on our web browsers. And notably: no mention of goldfish.

However, there is one section that might have been mistakenly construed as relating to “attention span” (bolds are mine):

“….participants stayed only for a short period on most pages. 25% of all documents were displayed for less than 4 seconds, and 52% of all visits were shorter than 10 seconds (median: 9.4s) . However, nearly 10% of the page visits were longer than two minutes. […] The peak value of the average stay times is located between 2 and 3 seconds; these stay times contribute 8.6% of all visits.”

I speculate that some people looked at the “52%” and started thinking this was evidence for our attention span lasting 9 seconds.

But even if we were to pretend that this study was about attention span — which it’s not — or generalize a study with only 25 participants (and only a 52% majority being under 10 seconds)… it still doesn’t explain where the “8 seconds” came from. Why aren’t they citing “9 seconds,” as in the “9.4” median score the researchers mentioned? Maybe because it makes it easier to compare us to goldfish at 9 seconds?

Fishy citations

In his 2014 book “Brief: Make a Bigger Impact by Saying Less,” Joseph McCormack wrote “Prevailing research says that the average attention span is down to 8 seconds from 12 over the past five years.” I’m not sure where he got those particular numbers, but the study he cited for this was, sure enough, the 2008 study above. The “past five years” quote would refer to 2009–2014; but how can he claim anything about that timeframe by citing a study from 2008?

So you may be wondering “then where did the whole goldfish reference come from?”

I suspect that it mostly goes back to a BBC article from 2002 called “ Turning into digital goldfish .” In fact, this is what Sally Hogshead, author of “How the World Sees You” cited when she claimed that you need to make your first impression within 9 seconds, before we lose our attention. Her book also came out in 2014.

BCA v. Singh

Whether it’s someone selling a service, or just trying to get more eyeballs on their content, it’s not unheard of for people to cite real studies, but which don’t actually support the claims they make. It’s as if they think we’ll be too lazy or busy to verify them — which is often true. But this reminds me of a famous case from 2008–2010.

In 2009, the BCA (British Chiropractic Association) submitted 29 studies as evidence with which to sue science writer Simon Singh for libel, after he wrote (in the Guardian, 2008 ) that “the chiropractic profession […] happily promotes bogus treatments,” with loads of evidence for the dangers of the practice. None of the BCA’s studies actually refuted what Singh had stated in his article; and so in 2010, Singh effectively won the case.

I assume “Statistic Brain” submitted a few red herring sources much in the same was as the BCA did — hoping that people wouldn’t actually dig too deep into them.

Attention span

What it does (not) mean.

Let’s consider some definitions of “attention span” (bolds are mine):

The length of time for which a person is able to concentrate mentally on a particular activity. ( Google’s English dictionary / Oxford Languages )
The interval during which an individual can concentrate , as on a single object, idea, or activity. ( Dictionary.com )
How long you can focus on something or spend on a task before you need a break or get distracted ( WebMD )
The length of time that someone can keep their thoughts and interest fixed on something ( Cambridge dictionary )

Notice that it’s always about the ability to concentrate. Lazy reporters may suggest that since people don’t do something, it must be because they can’t do it (eg. staying on a webpage that’s loading slowly)… but that’s not a fair characterization. Let’s consider this in context.

If a restaurant’s menu webpage fails to load quickly, and you have lots of alternatives to choose from nearby, you might leave it quickly and go to a competitor. Is that because of a low attention span, or just impatience? As Shaun Buck from Entrepreneur puts it: “The problem isn’t attention span; the problem is we have an infinite number of options to choose from.”

The case for common sense

The way so many of these articles have been read, it’s as if people all over the world thought that in 2015, we suddenly became temporarily brain-dead at 9 seconds into any psychological experience. Wouldn’t someone have noticed this overnight global change in cognition?

For context, the runtime of the Academy Award winner for Best Picture in 2015 ( Birdman ) was 2 hours. This year’s winner ( Everything Everywhere All at Once ) was 2 hours, 20 seconds. Did some people they think the audience just tuned out at the start of the opening credits? It defies common sense.

Even the fictional character “Ten-second Tom” from the comedy movie “ 50 First Dates ” — who suffered from extremely severe anterograde amnesia (the inability to form new memories) — was able to focus for a whole 2 seconds longer than the fictional humans from this made-up data.

And yet, in 2022, King’s College London was part of a major UK public survey that found:

50% of respondents “wrongly believe the average attention span among adults today is just eight seconds long.”
50% of respondents believe that we have a worse attention span than goldfish

Goldfish-ology

Goldfish have an unwarranted reputation for their inability to learn/focus, but a few notable studies include research out of Israel that the Telegraph reported on in 2009, which found goldfish were able to remember things for at least 5 months. Also, an amateur scientist from the US (who won a Young Naturalist Award for her research in 2015) observed their ability to retain spatial memory even 6 months after learning to navigate a maze. Furthermore, also from Israel, researchers in 2022 taught goldfish to “drive” a vehicle.

…Yep, you read that right.

Rather than explaining how that works, I’ll just share a picture (but there’s a video in the article ), and a quote by researcher Shachar Givon:

Surprisingly, it doesn’t take the fish a long time to learn how to drive the vehicle. They’re confused at first. They don’t know what’s going on but they’re very quick to realise that there is a correlation between their movement and the movement of the machine that they’re in.

Bad reporting

Misunderstanding the science.

At the time, aside from the sources that ran with the idea that Canadians have a sub-goldfish level of attention span , we also saw the NBA freak out about whether their games are too long , and people started to wonder whether politicians (namely Hilary Clinton) would be able to appeal to people in such small (ie. 8-second) tidbits during election season in the US. And of course, a quick Google search will reveal the myriad of marketers still quoting this myth today.

These are all unwarranted. In fact, in Microsoft’s report, the very first sentence of the Foreword on page 1 reads: “Think digital is killing attention spans? Think again.”

Confusing messages

Ironically, some are so quick to report these claims without the apparent attention span to actually read the first page of the report. But if the first sentence wasn’t clear enough, the Foreword ends with “Rest assured, digital won’t be the cause of our (at least attentional) downfall.”

So I’m not sure who to blame… the lazy reporting of the publications who want to get more eyeballs on their articles through sensationalism , or Microsoft for including it in the first place?

Actually, I do know — it’s Microsoft’s fault.

They should’ve issued a statement officially retracting/disregarding that infographic, or releasing a new version… or done anything to better communicate that the claims have not been substantiated and shouldn’t have been included in the first place. They don’t belong in that report at all, as they undercutting other points in the report.

Now we know better… right?

The claim (still) heard ‘round the world.

Even with the benefit of plenty of research and repudiations later, I found tons of recent articles still quoting this discredited claim. Even recent books, like The Psychology of Websites (2021) are still getting duped by this report. Author Matthew Capala erroneously states “Microsoft’s study revealed that humans have an attention span of 8 seconds” (p. 141).

Microsoft’s perpetuation of their own myth

While researching for this article, I came across a 2021 piece on Microsoft’s own website , again referencing the 8-second myth they were responsible for:

Today’s consumers are seemingly always in a hurry, with little time or patience for sales pitches. […] Eight seconds. Studies show that’s how long you have to capture someone’s attention.

But what’s even more bizarre than how Microsoft perpetuated this myth is that in their own reference section (at the bottom of the article), they actually link to the BBC report I mentioned above. It’s entitled “Busting the attention span myth,” as you can see from this screenshot (reference #2).

And yet… even more perplexing is how they never actually reference this piece anywhere in their article(!)… which means that it didn’t need to be included there at all.

I am truly dumbfounded by this inclusion; but at least we know they can’t claim to be ignorant of the BBC story which refutes the claim made in this very article… because it’s right there!

If you ever hear someone claiming what the infographic states… just remember that: a) they’re probably trying to sell you something, and b) these claims are based off a report that cites research that doesn’t appear to have ever existed, plus one legit study that didn’t say this at all.

Even if our attention spans are actually dwindling (they probably are), it’s important to separate legitimate science from pseudoscience. Falsehoods can have real-world consequences, such as when people make substantial decisions based on them; or denigrating the rigorous standards that psychology research is supposed to live up to.

Just because it feels true (considering how distracted we are with constant info, ads, notifications, etc.), it doesn’t mean it is true. The myth lives on because it’s surprising, believable, and memorable. But if you care to learn about our evolving understanding of human psychology, I promise you that the reality is much more fascinating than the myths.

Written by Ryo Mac

Lead Product Designer & UX writer

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Microsoft study shows that tech is shortening your attention span

Think the abundance of technology in your life is making it harder to concentrate for long periods? Microsoft might just have some evidence to support your theory. It recently published a study (conducted using both surveys and EEG scans ) suggesting that the average attention span has fallen precipitously since the start of the century. While people could focus on a task for 12 seconds back in 2000, that figure dropped to 8 seconds in 2013 -- about one second less than a goldfish. Reportedly, a lot of that reduction stems from a combination of smartphones and an avalanche of content. Many younger people find themselves compulsively checking their phones, and the glut of things to do on the web (such as social networking) makes it all too easy to find diversions.

Thankfully, it's not all bad. While tech is hurting attention spans overall, it also appears to improve your abilities to both multitask and concentrate in short bursts. You not only get a better sense of what deserves your attention, but do a better job of committing useful things to memory. There are limits to these improvements (heavy social networking tends to make things worse as a whole), but you can take comfort in knowing that there's an upside to your gadget addictions.

[Image credit: Shutterstock]

Download Microsoft Attention Spans Research Report

Date: October 2019
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Speaking of Psychology: Why our attention spans are shrinking, with Gloria Mark, PhD

Episode 225.

These days, most of us live our lives tethered to our computers and smartphones, which are unending sources of distraction. Research has shown that over the past couple of decades people’s attention spans have shrunk in measurable ways. Gloria Mark, PhD, of the University of California Irvine, talks about how the internet and digital devices have affected our ability to focus, why multitasking is so stressful, and how understanding the science of attention can help us to regain our focus when we need it.

About the expert: Gloria Mark, PhD

Kim Mills : When was the last time that you had an entire day completely free from digital distractions? No text messages, no email notifications, no social media and no aimless internet browsing. It might be hard to think of the last time you even had a tech free hour. These days, most of us live our lives tethered to our computers and our smartphones, which are unending sources of distraction. Sometimes it can feel impossible to concentrate deeply on anything for any significant length of time.

And indeed researchers have found evidence that over the past couple of decades, people's attention spans have shrunk considerably. So how has the rise of the internet and digital devices affected our ability to focus and pay attention? What does it mean to pay attention to something anyway? When you're being bombarded by different tasks, notifications, and emails, is it possible to multitask and deal with them all effectively? Or is productive multitasking a myth? How can understanding the science of attention help us to regain our focus when we need it to improve both our productivity and our happiness?

Welcome to Speaking of Psychology , the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills.

My guest today is Dr. Gloria Mark, a psychologist and the chancellor's professor of informatics at the University of California Irvine. Dr. Mark studies how people interact with technology in their everyday lives and how technology affects our attention, multitasking, mood, and stress level. She studies people's behavior in real world settings and she's found that our attention spans have been shrinking over the past two decades. Her new book, published in January, is called Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness, and Productivity .

Dr. Mark, thank you for joining me today.

Gloria Mark, PhD : Thank you so much for having me.

Mills : Most of us probably think that we know what it means when we say we pay attention to something, but you wrote in your book that there are different kinds of attention. Can you talk about that? What are the different kinds of attentions that we experience in our everyday life?

Mark : Let me actually start out by talking about what William James, the father of psychology, says about attention. So back in the 19th century, he said “Everyone knows what attention is. It's the taking possession by the mind in clear and vivid form of one out of what seems several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought.” Of course, everyone knows what attention is. We all believe we know what attention is, but it's a lot more complicated than that.

So when I was studying attention, it occurred to me that you can be very engaged in something and you can put in a lot of mental effort. If I'm reading an article, it be challenging for me. On the other hand, there's a lot of things we do that are not at all challenging, but we're very engaged in. So when we're playing solitaire or playing simple games online, or if a person is gardening, they might be very engaged and not at all challenged. So we set out to study different kinds of attention when people use their devices. And what we did was we probed people throughout the day and we asked them at this point in time, want you to respond very quickly and tell us how engaged were you in what you just did, and how challenged were you in what you just did?

We find that when people are engaged and challenged, there seems to be rhythms in the day when this happens. And people seem to have peaks of times when they do this. We call this focused attention, tends to be late morning and again mid to late afternoon, about two to three. And when people are very engaged in something and not at all challenged, we call that rote activity.

Lots of things that people do are rote activity when they're online. It could be simple games, it could be even reading the news or doing social media. They tend to do that relatively uniformly throughout the day. But we do find that focused attention occurs in rhythms and it seems to correspond to the ebb and flow of our mental resources that we have available.

Mills : Well, I mentioned in the introduction that you have found evidence that our attention spans have shrunk in recent years, at least as measured by how long people spend on tasks and screens at work. Can you talk about that? How much have our attention spans shrunk?

Mark : So we started measuring this back in 2004, and at the time the measures that we used were stopwatches because that was the most precise thing we had at the time. We would shadow people with stopwatches for every single activity they did. We would record the start time and the stop time. So you're on a screen where you're working in a Word doc, as soon as you get to that screen, we clicked start time, soon as they turned away and checked email, we clicked stop time for the Word document, start time for the email. But fortunately, sophisticated computer logging methods were developed, and so of course we switched to those. So back in 2004, we found the average attention span on any screen to be two and a half minutes on average. Throughout the years it became shorter. So around 2012 we found it to be 75 seconds.

This is with logging techniques. This is an average. And then in the last five, six years, we found it to average about 47 seconds, and others have replicated this result within a few seconds. So it seems to be quite robust. Now, another way to think about this result is the median. The median means the midpoint of observations. The median is 40 seconds. And what this means is that half of all the measurements that we found were 40 seconds or less of people's attention spans. Now obviously because we're talking about averages and medians, sometimes people do spend longer, but quite a good bit of the time, their attention spans are much shorter and with an average coming to 47 seconds.

Mills : So why is this a problem? Since it seems to be happening almost universally at this point, is this just the new normal?

Mark : It seems to be the new normal because we seem to have reached a steady state over the last five or six years where these are the measures that we're seeing. Is this a good thing? I would argue it's not a good thing for the following reasons. First of all, we find in our research a correlation between frequency of attention switching and stress. So the faster the attention switching occurs, stress is measured by people wearing heart rate monitors. We show that stress goes up. We know from decades of research in the laboratory that when people multitask, they experience stress, blood pressure rises. There's a physiological marker in the body that indicates people are stressed. And in our studies, we've also simply asked people with well valid instruments to report their stress, their perceived stress, and it's reported to be higher the faster that we measure attention shifting.

So all of these measures seem to be consistent. I'll also measure that when people shift their attention so fast, and this is multitasking, when you keep switching your attention among different activities, people make more errors. And that's been shown in studies in the real world with physicians, nurses, pilots. We also know that performance slows. Why? Because there's something called a switch cost. So every time you switch your attention, you have to reorient to that new activity, that new thing you're paying attention to, and it takes a little bit of time.

So imagine if you're writing, let's say, say you're writing a chapter and you suddenly stop what you're doing and you switch and do something else, and then you come back to it, it's going to take you some time to reconstruct, what was I writing? What was the topic I was thinking about? What were the words I was using? That takes a bit of time. And so we incur these switch costs throughout the day as we're switching our attention, and this creates more effort. It uses more of our very precious mental resources on top of the work that we actually need to do.

Mills : You've also found that some switching is good. It's normal during the course of a day so that you might really concentrate on something for a length of time, and then you take a break and maybe you go online or maybe if you're working from home, you put in a load of laundry or you take a walk. Isn't that something that we actually need to do?

Mark : Absolutely. It's so important that we take breaks because if you work until you get exhausted, then of course you can get burnout. It's so important to take breaks and replenish. And by taking breaks, we have more energy, we have more attentional capacity, and we can actually do more. We can be more productive. The problem is that in our current world, many work environments, people neglect to take meaningful breaks, and we get ourselves into position where our performance suffers as a result.

Now, if you're going to take a break, it's really important to take a break at a point in the task that's called a break point. And a break point is a natural stopping point in a task. So going back to the writing example, if I'm writing something, a breakpoint would be at the end of a section or even at the end of a paragraph, but at a point where when I come back to it, then there's not going to be a lot of effort for me to have to reconstruct what I was doing. I've already finished that part. If you interrupt yourself in the middle of doing something as opposed to a natural stopping point, you use up a lot more mental resources and it's also more stressful.

Mills : Well, for people who want to schedule breaks, who really want to intentionally make the changes that you're talking about, what do you think about programs such as internet blockers that prevent people from going online during certain hours of the day so that you can force yourself to be more focused? Do you think that those are effective?

Mark : We've done a study with internet blockers, and it turns out it very much depends on an individual's personality. So people who have poor self-regulation skills can benefit from these kinds of blockers. Essentially what you're doing is you're offloading the work of self-regulation onto the software, and the software becomes a proxy agent for you. It's doing the work. It turns out people who have good self-regulation skills, so people who score low in impulsivity as a trait, people who score high in conscientious these are people who are actually harmed by these blockers.

Why? Because these are people who are very good at taking breaks and coming right back to work. They can take a break, they can go to social media, they can go to a news site and they can take a break, relax themselves, then they can come back to work. In this study, we took away their opportunity to take a quick online break, and they got burnt out. They worked straight through. They didn't take breaks. On the whole, I prefer that people develop their own agency, their own self-efficacy in controlling their attention. These software blockers can be good at times, but I think it's far more important that people learn to develop their own skills to control their attention.

Mills : A lot has been written about the Pomodoro technique, which is basically you set a timer for every 25 minutes and then you agree you're going to work straight through for 25 minutes, a timer goes off and you get a five minute break. What about that as sort of a low tech blocker?

Mark : Well, that's fine, but there are individual differences and some people would be able to work longer than what the Pomodoro technique dictates. Some people would work less. I think it's much more important that people become self-aware of their own level of energy and the amount of attentional resources they have available and take breaks according to what their own levels are.

So I've learned to do this. I've learned to become more aware of what my own capacity is, and when I start feeling tired, that's the point when I take a break. If I know I've got a really hard task to do, I might schedule a break before I start doing that task so I can replenish myself and then right after so that I can build back up the resources that I expended. The worst thing you can do, the worst thing is to schedule back to back Zoom meetings without breaks that it just gets us exhausted. There's no transition between these meetings. So we need to schedule in transitions between these kinds of hard tasks.

Mills : And when we're talking about attention and attention spans, there's something a little bit different but related, which is the concept of flow. Can you explain what that is? Because that is a kind of attention and it's very, very different from what we've just been talking about.

Mark : That's right. So flow is a type of attention that the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi discovered, and it's what he calls the optimal state of attention. It's when people are so immersed in something that time just doesn't seem to matter. And so it's when we are at our peak creativity, we're using the optimal amount of challenge of our skills. So if we're not challenged enough in whatever your skill happens to be, you won't go into flow. If you're challenged too much in your skill, you won't go into flow. It'll be too hard. So there's that sweet spot that you have to hit to go into flow. So before I went into psychology, I actually had studied fine arts and used to be an artist, and I would get into flow regularly, and it's the nature of the work of being an artist and being creative that I could regularly get into flow.

Now, as a scientist, I rarely get into flow because of the nature of my work where I have to be very analytical and I have to use very careful thought. Is that a bad thing? No, not at all. It's very rewarding. It's just I realize that the nature of my work and the nature of a lot of knowledge work is such that it may not be conducive to flow, but sometimes I get into flow. If I'm in say a brainstorming session with other people, we might get into a kind of group flow where everyone is feeding off of each other's ideas. But in my typical day-to-day life, now, I generally don't get into flow, and it's not a bad thing.

Mills : Let's talk for a minute about the effect of the internet and devices on children's attention span. Most of your research has been with adults, but kids are spending a lot of time on devices as well. Are they going to have even more trouble with attention than those of us who first experience this level of distraction as adults?

Mark : This is something that I think we should be very concerned about as a society. So it turns out children that are as young as two to four years old, they already average two and a half hours of screen time a day. And when they get to be between five and eight, they average about three hours of screen time a day. Now, most of that screen time, it's TV and YouTube viewing, but children also do a lot of gaming. So we know from a lot of laboratory studies that when children are very young, they're a lot more susceptible to distraction than older children. And when they're distracted, it takes them longer to get back and focus again on that thing that they were distracted from. So I worry that when young children are spending so much time on the screen, it acculturates them to think that this is normal behavior to be on a screen.

The problem is that when children are very young, there are certain parts of their brain that are not yet mature. So their ability to self-control and a part of the brain called executive function and executive function, you can think of it as the governor of the mind. So it manages things like decision-making, and setting priorities of what we should be paying attention to. It helps manage interference of peripheral stimuli in the environment, and executive function is not yet well developed and children are sitting in front of screens and they're exposed to all kinds of potential distractions.

So I think this is not a good idea. Children need self-control for learning, and more and more we're seeing schools having a lot of online learning available for kids, and kids need self-control as a skill to be able to search for information, to do math problems online, to read and write without being distracted. I find it problematic that we're putting children into a digital world before some very critical mental functions are fully developed. I don't think kids are really ready for that.

Mills : Can focus be taught? I mean, you seem to be implying that we need to be doing something particularly with children so that they aren't constantly distracted. But how do you teach somebody to focus on something?

Mark : Well, for children, I think the best thing children can do is to do activity off-screen. And I think they would learn to focus, whether it's playing outside, reading books is an excellent way to get children to focus. If we're talking about adults, I think that one of the best things that adults can do is to make sure that your internal tank of mental resources is kept at high capacity. So when you have a full tank of resources, you can focus much better than when you're just spent, when your resources have just drained because you're doing hard work all day, you're switching your attention a lot. It's going to be very, very hard to focus, and there are things we can do to build up those resources. So one of the best things you can do is to get a really good night's sleep. Everyone says, of course we know you should get a good night's sleep, but let me tell you what happens when you don't. When people accumulate what's called sleep debt and sleep debt is the accumulation of loss of sleep.

If you need eight hours of sleep a night—and I need eight hours of sleep a night—but if you're only getting six hours a night, that difference is called a sleep debt. And if you're consistently getting six hours of sleep a night, you're accumulating sleep debt. And we know that the greater the sleep debt, the shorter the attention spans. And what do people do when they have a lot of sleep debt? We found that they tend to do more lightweight activities like social media. They just don't have the resources to be able to focus and do hard work, so they do what's easy based on the amount of resources that they have available.

Mills : Let's switch topics for a minute to something else that you talk about in your book, which is how TV and movies have changed in the past few decades. You're right that the pace of television and movies has sped up and things like the length of each camera shot, they're getting shorter. Why is that? And are those changes affecting our attention or is this happening because the people who are creating these things already know that we have no attention anymore?

Mark : So I was very surprised to learn that TV and film shot lengths have decreased over the years. They started out much longer. They now average about four seconds a shot length. That's on average. If you watch MTV music videos, they're much shorter. They're only a couple of seconds. So we've become accustomed to seeing very fast shot lengths when we look at TV and film. Even commercials have shortened in length. Commercials used to be much longer. Now it's not uncommon to see six-second commercials, even shorter than that. Now it's a chicken and egg question. We don't know if TV and film have affected our attention spans on computers and phones. We don't know if our attention spans have affected the decision-making of film editors and directors. We don't know exactly if there is any causal connection we see these two parallel trends.

It could be the case that directors and editors are influenced by their own short attention spans when they create these film shots or it could be that they're creating short film shots because they think that's what the viewer wants to see. But this has become quite ubiquitous. In fact, on YouTube, there's a particular YouTube aesthetic which uses jump cuts. So when you're watching a YouTube film, the film becomes very jumpy. The natural pauses that people make when they speak it is removed. So the idea is to pack more content into a shorter amount of time. So we're seeing short lengths of content from all directions. It's not just what we're attending to on computers and phones.

Mills : But I think you found that some of this we're doing to ourselves. I know some people who feel like they're so time crunched that when they want to listen to a podcast, they turn up the speed to 1.5 or 2 and then listen to it. Why are we doing this to ourselves and is this helping?

Mark : I myself have sometimes done that?. Why do we do this? There's a number of reasons. I can't say exactly why we do it. It could be because we want to fit more content into a shorter amount of time because there's so much content available, right? We're talking about access to the world's largest candy store, and we want to sample all the wares that are available. So of course, you might want to speed up the podcast so that you can simply take more in and quickly get to your next favorite podcast. So I don't know exactly why we're doing it on ourselves. It could be also out of habit. We're just used to listening to things faster, but we do have all of this content available to us at our fingertips within milliseconds, and so perhaps we just want to sample as much as we possibly can.

Mills : Now, during the pandemic, many people have switched to remote work, which I'm guessing has meant more emails, more messages on Slack, and Teams, and workers have to deal with all of this. How do you think this is affecting people's attention and focus? Do you even know? Is it too soon to say?

Mark : Yeah, so I've worked on a survey with colleagues. So we have people’s self-reports, they've reported that it's hard to focus. I've done other work where we're looking at team interaction in remote work and have picked up some information from that. People do report having a hard time focusing. It's a different kind of distraction than you would have in a workplace. Of course, you're distracted by the pile of dirty laundry that you're looking at. In a workplace, you might be distracted by ambient noise in the workplace. We do know that it makes a difference whether people have a private workspace at home where it can be quiet or whether they have to share a public working space with others, which is more distracting. Some people might go to a cafe to work, and of course, that creates another type of distraction. So a lot of it very much depends on the environment, where the person is working.

We also know that if you're remote from your colleagues, you can't really signal to them when is a good time to interrupt. If you're in a workplace, and especially if you can see your colleagues, you can see when they just hung up the phone, then you know it might be a nice time to walk over and talk to them or you might stand outside their office and wait, and then you can see when it's good to interrupt. When we're remote, we don't have that visual information, and so we can just be sending electronic communications to our colleagues at all time. There's another study that I did with my postdoc, and she found that a lot of people feel that they want to go above and beyond what they ordinarily do to be able to signal to their colleagues, to their supervisors that they're working hard. And so they jump to answer their email, their Slack messages so that they can demonstrate, hey, I'm working—you don't see me, but I want you to know that I'm here and I'm working hard, and that's why I'm going to jump on these messages.

Mills : Now, we've been talking a lot about what individuals can do regarding better attention spans, but are there changes that organizations should be making or even changes at a societal level that could help all of us with boosting our ability to stay focused on important things?

Mark : There are, and I'm a big advocate for changes on a collective level. And the reason is that if any individual decides to just pull out and completely cut themselves off from technology, they might penalize themselves. If you're a knowledge worker of any kind, you're cutting yourself off from important work communications. You can be cutting yourself off from communications from family, friends, loved ones, from important news in the world. So it's not always beneficial for any individual to cut themselves off, but an organization can do things. They can, for example, control times during the day when electronic communications are sent. They can create a window of time when no communications would be sent, and this would be a quiet time when people can work. In our research, we find that people check email on average 77 times a day. And if you have this quiet time, at least you can curtail that checking.

We might be able to reduce the amount of checking because there's no point to check, there won't be email coming. On a societal level, there's starting to be what's called right to disconnect laws, and there's one in France, it's called the El Khomri law. There's also Ireland and Ontario have policies, so other countries are starting to pick up on this, and it's the idea that no worker can be penalized if they do not answer electronic communications before and after work hours. New York City tried to introduce a right to disconnect law in its city council meeting. That got shut down very quickly. And my favorite, I read the transcripts of the meeting, and my favorite response, my favorite argument against it was from the Bureau of Tourism, which said, we're the greatest tourist city in the world, we're the city that never sleeps.

So if we have right to disconnect laws, it enables people to detach from work, and that has so much psychological benefit for individuals. You truly do need a break from work. We can't be on work 24/7, and that's what's happening. The borders between our personal life and work life have just blurred so that in personal time when people are at home after work, they're dealing with work problems, and work communications. People do need time to really relax, to break away from work. It's such a great psychological benefit, and if they can do that, it enables them to better reattach to work the next day because they're fresh, they're replenished. So I'm a big advocate of right to disconnect policy.

Mills : let me ask you a totally different question, which is what's next for you? What are you working on now? What are the important research questions that you want to see answered?

Mark : Yeah, so I would like to continue looking at our attention. I'm interested in a lot of things. I'm interested in how we can get more value from the internet. We have this incredible resource available to us, and so rather than be upset by it because it distracts us, how can we turn that around and instead find value from it? And how can we utilize our time best and optimize our time best when we use the resources that the internet offers without getting exhausted from it?

And I also have been looking at teamwork, remote teamwork and how that can be optimized because more and more companies are starting to have hybrid work and remote work, and what are the repercussions from that? What are the benefits from that? So I'd like to understand that better.

Mills : Well, that all sounds really interesting. I look forward to seeing your subsequent research. Appreciate your joining me today, Dr. Mark. Thank you very much.

Mark : Thank you so much for having me.

Mills : You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at speakingofpsychology.org or on Apple, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you've heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at [email protected] . Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lea Winerman. Our sound editor is Chris Condayan.

Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I'm Kim Mills.

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Episode 225: Why our attention spans are shrinking, with Gloria Mark, PhD

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Gloria Mark, PhD
Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity

Speaking of Psychology

Speaking of Psychology is an audio podcast series highlighting some of the latest, most important, and relevant psychological research being conducted today.

Produced by the American Psychological Association, these podcasts will help listeners apply the science of psychology to their everyday lives.

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Your host: Kim I. Mills

Kim I. Mills is senior director of strategic external communications and public affairs for the American Psychological Association, where she has worked since 2007. Mills led APA’s foray into social media and envisioned and launched APA’s award-winning podcast series Speaking of Psychology in 2013. A former reporter and editor for The Associated Press, Mills has also written for publications including The Washington Post , Fast Company , American Journalism Review , Dallas Morning News , MSNBC.com and Harvard Business Review .

In her 30+-year career in communications, Mills has extensive media experience, including being interviewed by The New York Times , The Washington Post , The Wall Street Journal , and other top-tier print media. She has appeared on CNN, Good Morning America , Hannity and Colmes , CSPAN, and the BBC, to name a few of her broadcast engagements. Mills holds a bachelor’s degree in biology from Barnard College and a master’s in journalism from New York University.

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Microsoft: Goldfish have higher attention spans than we do thanks to digital lifestyles

Microsoft cross-screen evolution research found that tech and social media savvy users who gobble up digital content on various devices have a shorter attention span than goldfish..

If you use multiple digital devices, then you may have a shorter attention span than a goldfish. According to Microsoft , “The average human attention span in 2000 was 12 seconds, but by 2013 it was only 8 seconds (1 second shorter than a goldfish!).”

Microsoft researchers surveyed 2,000 Canadians and used electroencephalograms (EEG scans) to study the brain activity of 112 participants. Microsoft said the goal for its cross-screen evolution research “is to understand what impact technology and today’s digital lives are having on attention spans.”

The research found that “overall, digital lifestyles have a negative impact on prolonged focus.” Multi-screening behavior, media consumption, social media usage, and technology adoption rate were listed as top factors that impact attention span and the ability to stay focused on a single task.

If you are tech-savvy yet can maintain a laser tunnel-vision focus, then you really should ask for a pay raise. Microsoft’s research found that long-term focus of early tech adopters, heavy social media users, and people who consume a lot of digital content is mostly eroded.

Although tech-savvy and heavy social media users were said to have “lower sustained attention in the long run,” these same individuals have “more bursts of high attention in the short term.” Microsoft found that “tech adoption and social media usage are training consumers to become better at processing and encoding information through short bursts of high attention,” but sadly “this advantage erodes over time.”

Additionally, “people with higher selective attention appear to actively choose to have fewer distractions and multi-screen less frequency. On the other hand, heavy multi-screeners find it difficult to filter out irrelevant stimuli–they’re more easily distracted by multiple streams of media.”

Other interesting findings from Microsoft’s research included:

Following the same pattern as social media usage, early tech adopters pay more attention to digital screens. They also process information better than later adaptors in these interactive environments.
For TV, while early adopters pay less attention overall, they still process information significantly better–they’ve trained their brains to do more with less.

The study, which specifically looked at how Canadians’ attention spans have been affected by digital lifestyles, was aimed at marketers as it is apparently harder than ever to snag and keep consumers’ attention. “Canadians lose interest, FAST,” the research states. “They’re suckers for novelty. It’s more exciting to jump from subject to subject or device to device than to concentrate on a single thing at any one time.”

“The thrill of finding something new often makes connected consumers jump off one experience into another. The ‘feel good’ neurotransmitter, dopamine, is released when consumers are doing something they find rewarding,” Microsoft said. “19% of online viewer defect in the first 10 seconds.” Part of the advice to advertisers was to make “increasingly immersive, multi-touchpoint experiences” a “priority to combat drop-off amongst these audiences.”

Advertisers were advised to address all three types of attention: sustained, selective, and alternating, as well as to look to outdoor advertisements for inspiration on how to best snag attention.

You can check out the research paper and an infographic here .

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The Underlying Reason You Can't Focus

It's not the holidays. it's not technology. it's evolution..

Posted January 2, 2017 | Reviewed by Davia Sills

The first world has an attention problem.

A 2015 study by Microsoft Canada found that our average attention span—“the amount of concentrated time on a task without becoming distracted”—was 12 seconds in 2008. Five years later, it was only eight seconds—one second less than a goldfish’s .

The average knowledge worker consequently loses 2.2 hours of productivity per day to distractions and recovery time. And email, the web, instant messaging, and interruptions in knowledge work cost the U.S. $588 billion per year.

Why are we so bad at focusing?

One reason for our fishlike attention is today’s hyperactive , procreating content and commotion. We witness more data, more web pages, more TV shows, more cars, more video games, and more rapid-fire, instant-gratification technology every day.

Our access to information is unprecedented and ever-increasing. The Attention Economy notes that one Sunday New York Times edition contains more factual information than the entirety of written material that 15th-century readers could access. Their problem was not “finding time to read, but finding enough reading to fill the time.” Our new wealth of information has created “a poverty of attention,” as political scientist Herbert Simon put it.

But there’s another, maybe bigger, reason why we’re distracted: What’s important for modern humans and society has changed, and it’s now instinctively hard to recognize and prioritize. Our attention problem is due to both a lack of focus and focus on the wrong things.

Here's what I mean:

Our ancestors evolved over millions of years to pay attention to what mattered in pre-civilization savannahs: namely, new information about safety, weather, food, and what was moving (and therefore edible or dangerous). Our survival often depended on instantly processing these two elements.

Thanks to the Internet and advancing technology, today “infor-motion” inundates. What used to be sporadic and worth noting is now commonplace and rarely life-threatening.

So it matters less. Concentrating on what’s novel and fast is no longer as useful for our survival and success. But we’re instinctually still captured by it: The average American spends nearly as much time watching TV in a lifetime as working.

Instead, what’s important today is still and boring , like an empty Word document or an unsolved math problem. As Cal Newport argues in Deep Work , the activities that are personally and economically rewarding in modern society are highly specialized, irreplaceable skills and intense, self-controlled focus.

Without tolerance for work that's slow-moving and at times uninteresting, deeper-working human competition , aka machines, will beat us and take our jobs. Oxford employment economists predict that almost half of existing jobs are “at risk of death by computerization within 20 years.”

In short, the attention of modern humans—who have nearly identical genes and brains to our late ancestors, who roamed the plains with spears—automatically shifts to what has only recently become of limited value for ourselves and society. While our higher, conscious minds might recognize that checking email, browsing social media , and running down the YouTube rabbit hole isn’t fulfilling, productive, or important, our instincts say that’s exactly what we should be doing.

So here’s our real attention problem as I see it: Contemporary society doesn’t favor the same things evolution did. We evolved to pay attention to new information and motion. Civilization—which is just the last .1 percent of human existence—rewards ignoring the things we were primed, as animals, to drop everything for: staying still and single-minded long enough to concentrate and produce something valuable.

Because natural selection won’t kill off those of us who can’t adapt to society’s new demands, humans will have to fight our entrancement by new, fast stuff forever. Each year, with more new, fast stuff, the battle toughens.

The good news is, in the first world, we’re lucky enough to feasibly channel our attention to deeper, more meaningful things without risking death.

Furthermore, the increasing need for self-control in our era of endless information makes us not just human, but, in some ways, more human than we used to be. We can prioritize our highest faculties over our rote instincts, losing nothing, and gaining free will .

A version of this article originally appeared on Forbes .

fp.advertising.microsoft.com/en/WWDocs/User/display/cl/researchreport/31966/en/microsoft-attention-spans-research-report.pdf

Caroline Beaton is a freelance journalist based in Denver. Her writing on psychology, health and culture has appeared in the Atlantic, Vice, Forbes and elsewhere.

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New Microsoft Study Shows Rapid Decline in Attention Spans

The more people reported reliance upon electronic devices in their daily lives, the less they were able to sustain their attention.

The results of the study revealed the new adult attention span to be, on average, four seconds less than the 12-second attention span 12 years ago and one second less than the attention span of a goldfish.

That’s right; a creature you can win in a carnival booth has a better ability to concentrate than a smartphone-addicted adult.

So what does this mean to your life and what can you do to extend your attention span? If we can stay focused for a few more minutes, I’ll discuss the negative impact of a shrinking attention span and the answer science has discovered for increasing your focus.

The featured photo on this page by @esmith_images (Instagram) says it all. How many precious moments might you miss each day when absorbed in your gadgets?

Plugged In Means Tuned Out

The biggest factor to human happiness isn’t money; it’s one’s ability (or inability) to be attentive to the present moment. In other words, how mindful you are at any time. That’s what Matt Killingsworth , an expert on happiness studies, suggested in a TED talk based on his research findings (2) .

The results were simple: the more people’s minds wandered from what they were doing, the less happy they were.

If you’re someone who adopted digital technology early in life, use social media frequently, or are a “digital native” age 18-24, chances are you find it challenging to concentrate for sustained periods of time.

You probably have an urge to check your phone when you have nothing better to do. You may find yourself having random thoughts or daydreams in the middle of a school or work project. You may even have to work late or on weekends to make up for unproductive time spent posting to social media.

These are all symptoms of “digital overload,” a condition University of California neuroscientists have warned can cause anxiety and over-stimulation (3) .

Personal Disconnection

Additionally, your relationship with your family or friends can suffer. When was the last time you and your friends spent time together without someone checking his or her phone during a lull in conversation?

And have you noticed that once one person picks up his or her phone, someone else will follow suit until everyone is staring at a screen instead of engaging one another?

No wonder people have reported increased feelings of loneliness or depression the more they participate in social media; it isolates them from friends who are physically present and forces them to compare their lives to unrealistic tidbits strangers choose to post online (4) .

A shorter attention span also means a more difficult time building trust within a romantic relationship. A study by the University of Essex revealed if couples try to talk with each other when they’re in close proximity to a cell phone, even if they aren’t using it, they feel less satisfied with their relationship and less confident in each others’ abilities to empathize (5) .

If one partner picks up his or her phone in the middle of a discussion, the message, while perhaps unintentional, is still hurtful: “My Twitter feed is more important than what you have to say.”

Attending to the Present Moment

Other research has documented the changes mindfulness meditation can make to brain regions that control memory and stress regulation (7) .

When you stay present in the moment you are living right now, you’ll find your attention will stretch to encompass all that truly matters in your life and filter out the noise and chatter of living in a digital world.

If you’d like to learn some easy mindful approaches to help buffer you from the effects of digital overload and increase your attention span, check out ‘ 7 Strategies to Maintain Mindfulness in the Modern World .’

Got any comments, questions or thoughts about this post? Feel free to post them in the comments section below.

(1) http://advertising.microsoft.com/en/cl/31966/how-does-digital-affect-canadian-attention-spans (2) https://melliobrien.com/ted-talk-happiness-is-mindfulness/ (3) https://melliobrien.com/scientists-warn-of-the-dangers-of-digital-overload/ (4) http://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2015/04/08/new-study-links-facebook-to-depression-but-now-we-actually-understand-why/ (5) http://spr.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/07/17/0265407512453827.abstract (6) http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/05/study-meditation-improves-memory-attention/275564/ (7) http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/01/110121144007.htm

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IMAGES

Microsoft attention-spans-research-report
Microsoft Study: Tech is Shortening the Average Human’s Attention Span
(PDF) Attention span during lectures: 8 seconds, 10 minutes, or more?
Microsoft attention-spans-research-report
Microsoft attention-spans-research-report
Microsoft attention-spans-research-report

VIDEO

Language, Emotion, and Personality: How the Words We Use Reflect Who We Are
Advertising
Why Attention Spans Are Cooked
Active Learning of Actions
Your Attention Span Is Being Used Against You

COMMENTS

PDF Microsoft Attention Spans Research Report
From Microsoft's Cross-Screen Evolution research, we know consumers' relationships ... report) ACE Neuro research EEG output score (acronym for attentional resources, connection, encoding) Attention bursts A count for the number of ... Microsoft attention spans, Spring 2015 | @msadvertisingca #msftattnspans. 1.
Microsoft Attention Spans Research Report
Microsoft Attention Spans Research Report - Free download as PDF File (.pdf), Text File (.txt) or read online for free. The document summarizes research from Microsoft on consumer attention spans in the digital age. The research found that while digital lifestyles reduce the ability to focus for long periods, people are getting better at processing information quickly.
Microsoft attention spans research report
Microsoft attention spans, Spring 2015 | @msadvertisingca #msftattnspans. As consumers are exposed to more messaging. across devices, they're starting to look for ways. to simplify, "switch off", and identify what's most. important. 54% of Canadians say technology can sometimes make their lives worse.
Microsoft Attention Spans Research Report
Microsoft Attention Spans Research Report - Free download as PDF File (.pdf), Text File (.txt) or read online for free. Scribd is the world's largest social reading and publishing site.
You Now Have a Shorter Attention Span Than a Goldfish
May 14, 2015 5:09 AM EDT. T he average attention span for the notoriously ill-focused goldfish is nine seconds, but according to a new study from Microsoft Corp., people now generally lose ...
PDF PowerPoint Presentation
Microsoft attention spans, Spring 2015 | @msadvertisingca #msftattnspans We know human attention is dwindling Source: Statistic brain The average human attention span in 2000 The average human attention span in 2013 The average attention span of a goldfish 12 seconds 8 seconds 9 seconds 6. This is the name and date of the report.
PDF Marketing with Purpose
Learn about Marketing with Purpose from Microsoft Advertising. Earn people's trust with inclusive and personalized marketing and build value for your business. ... We conducted research to discover what trust means to consumers, especially the role it plays in driving purchase consideration and business value. Get insights on the opportunity ...
Microsoft attention-spans-research-report
Microsoft attention-spans-research-report. Digital lifestyles are negatively impacting Canadians' ability to focus for prolonged periods. Heavy media consumption, social media usage, frequent multi-screening, and early technology adoption are correlated with poorer sustained attention. However, these groups have more frequent short bursts of ...
Attention And The 8-Second Attention Span
The Eight-Second Attention Span. The New York Times. Gagné, R. (1985). The Conditions of Learning and the Theory of Instruction (4th ed.). New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. Gausby, A. (Spring 2015). Attention Spans (Download PDF). Microsoft Canada. McSpadden, K. (May 14, 2015). You Now Have a Shorter Attention Span Than a Goldfish. Time ...
Microsoft Attention Spans Research Report
Since 3/4 Canadians use multiple devices at once (9/10 amongst millennials)1, marketers should look for ways to: Hold attention (versus competing stimuli) Create opportunities to capture consumers' wandering eyesSource 1: Microsoft Cross-Screen Evolution Research, 2014Microsoft attention spans, Spring 2015 | @msadvertisingca #msftattnspansIn ...
Attention span during lectures: 8 seconds, 10 minutes, or more?
attention but are content to all cite the same single initial report as the basis for the 10- to 15-min attention span assertion. For example, McKeachie (13) states that "Hartley and Davies' Address for reprint request and other correspondence: N. A. Bradbury, Dept. of Physiology and Biophysics, Member Master Teacher Guild, Chicago
PDF Reason Why
Reason Why
A review of the trend of microlearning
Furthermore, a survey (Gausby, 2015) conducted by Microsoft indicated that the average attention span of a human dropped from 12 to eight seconds, which means shorter than a goldfish. Given the average human attention span is decreasing, microlearning becomes more and more important because it emphasises short learning duration.
(PDF) Engaging Consumers In The Era Of The Eight-Second Attention Span
According to a 2015 study from Microsoft, the average consumer's attention span has dropped to eight seconds - one second less than that of a goldfish, the often-cited study revels in pointing ...
8-Second Attention Spans: Tracking the myth that just won't quit
Fishy citations. In his 2014 book "Brief: Make a Bigger Impact by Saying Less," Joseph McCormack wrote "Prevailing research says that the average attention span is down to 8 seconds from 12 ...
Microsoft study shows that tech is shortening your attention span
Microsoft might just have some evidence to support your theory. It recently published a study (conducted using both surveys and EEG scans) suggesting that the average attention span has fallen ...
Download Microsoft Attention Spans Research Report
Download Microsoft Attention Spans Research Report. Type: PDF. Date: October 2019. Size: 2MB. Author: Southern California Public Radio. This document was uploaded by user and they confirmed that they have the permission to share it. If you are author or own the copyright of this book, please report to us by using this DMCA report form.
Why our attention spans are shrinking, with Gloria Mark, PhD
These days, most of us live our lives tethered to our computers and smartphones, which are unending sources of distraction. Research has shown that over the past couple of decades people's attention spans have shrunk in measurable ways. Gloria Mark, PhD, of the University of California Irvine, talks about how the internet and digital devices ...
Microsoft: Goldfish have higher attention spans than internet users
Microsoft said the goal for its cross-screen evolution research "is to understand what impact technology and today's digital lives are having on attention spans." The research found that ...
The Underlying Reason You Can't Focus
A 2015 study by Microsoft Canada found that our average attention span—"the amount of concentrated time on a task without becoming distracted"—was 12 seconds in 2008. Five years later, it ...
PDF Do we have your attention?
However, the 8-second attention span is a widespread myth, originating from a piece of research published by Microsoft in 2015. According to psychological research, our ability to sustain attention for any given length of time depends on the task at hand, whether it's listening to a lecture, reading a book, or driving.
New Microsoft Study Shows Rapid Decline in Attention Spans
The more people reported reliance upon electronic devices in their daily lives, the less they were able to sustain their attention. The results of the study revealed the new adult attention span to be, on average, four seconds less than the 12-second attention span 12 years ago and one second less than the attention span of a goldfish.
microsoft-attention-spans-research-report.pdf
7/25/2019 microsoft-attention-spans-research-report.pdf 1/52Microsoft attention spans, Spring 2015 | @msadvertisingca #msftattnspansAttentionspansConsumer Insights ...