Attention span
Attention span is the duration a person can maintain focus on a single task or thought before becoming distracted. This ability is influenced by various factors, including the brain's functional capabilities, individual interest in the subject, environmental distractions, and overall well-being, such as physical health and rest. Developmentally, attention span matures from childhood into adulthood, generally reaching its peak in early adulthood, with some decline noted after age sixty. The rise of smartphones and digital media in the twenty-first century has raised concerns over shrinking attention spans, as these platforms often bombard users with rapidly changing stimuli.
Attention span is also linked to attentional control, which is the brain's capability to process and prioritize sensory information. Factors such as multitasking, emotional states, and past traumas can further impact an individual's ability to concentrate. Notably, research indicates a significant decrease in the average time people can focus on screens, emphasizing the challenge of maintaining attention in our digital age. Understanding attention span is crucial across various fields, from education to marketing, as it affects information retention and processing. As such, attention span is not merely a personal trait but a complex interplay of cognitive, emotional, and environmental elements.
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Subject Terms
Attention span
Attention span refers to the amount of time a person can spend focused on one task or thought before losing concentration. It is affected by a number of factors, including the functional ability of the brain, interest in the subject, environmental distractions, and the ability to filter disruptions. Other factors such as whether a person is feeling well and is well rested and fed can affect the attention span on a temporary basis. A person’s attention span matures throughout childhood and reaches full potential in adulthood. Attention span sometimes begins to decline after age sixty. The ubiquitousness of smartphones in the twenty-first century has played a large role in causing attention spans to shrink.
Background
Researchers are still working to fully understand how people pay attention, but they do know that concentration and attention are part of the function of the brain’s frontal lobe. Paying attention to something usually begins as an unintentional and inactive process when stimuli come into the brain through the nervous system. Visual stimuli from the eyes, auditory stimuli from the ears, olfactory stimuli from the nose, and other sensory stimuli such as temperature, touch, and taste all come into the frontal lobe, which begins to process it.
This could overwhelm the brain and the thoughts of the person if it were not for built-in limitations in the brain. For example, there are light waves that are at levels that humans do not process, even though many animals do. The brain is also most likely to focus on stimuli that are at an extreme of contrast, so a fast-moving object or a loud sound will be more likely to catch a person’s attention.
In addition to these built-in parameters, humans are also able to train their brains to respond to certain stimuli. For instance, people are more likely to respond to their own name being called than to other random names, and the sound of a child crying will gain a parent’s attention over many other stimuli. Sometimes it seems like the brain fixates on certain stimuli to the point where a person cannot ignore it. This often happens with stimuli that are new, especially if they are perceived as unpleasant, such as city traffic noise to someone who is used to nature sounds.
The brain can also self-divert from many stimuli. For example, someone who is trying to study may find the mind wandering to the sounds of a nearby television, or someone sitting in a meeting may begin thinking about weekend plans. The degree to which a person is able to control how well the brain focuses on a thought or stimulus is part of how long of an attention span the person has.
Overview
Attention span begins to develop in childhood. By the age of ten, children will have developed the ability to sustain attention for much longer periods than younger children, and thirteen-year-olds will generally have developed a good ability to sustain attention. This will be refined throughout the adult years, as the brain improves its ability to determine the importance of stimuli and the ability to tune out certain stimuli as needed. Adults will have fully developed attention skills, but beginning between the ages of forty and sixty, the brain’s ability to limit stimuli begins to decrease so that attention span may also decrease toward the end of that time frame.
A number of factors can affect a person’s attention span. Much of attention span is dependent on the functional ability of the brain and its prefrontal cortex to process stimuli; therefore, the health of the brain is key to attention. Brain damage due to inherited conditions, illness, or traumatic injury can affect how well the brain works and can affect attention span. Temporary limitations can also occur when a person is ill, hungry, dehydrated, or sleep-deprived. The use of many drugs—including legal and illegal—as well as alcohol can also negatively affect attention span. Limitations from these causes are generally temporary and will usually go away once the cause has been eliminated. Other factors such as depression, emotional trauma, neglect, or physical, mental, or sexual abuse can also affect attention span.
Attention span is also affected by other things, such as how interested the person is in the task or subject. For example, a person may maintain attention for much longer while watching an enjoyable television show than he is able to pay attention to a lecture about a boring subject. Some level of focus can also be lost if what the person is attempting to focus on reminds him of something else. For instance, if an instructor mentions an upcoming test, it might cause a student to start thinking about a test scheduled for later that day and begin mentally reviewing material for that test instead of focusing on the current class material. Multitasking—trying to do more than one thing at a time—also reduces focus and the ability to pay attention.
Technology also plays a role in attention span. Some experts have claimed that the advent of television, with short bursts of content bracketed by commercials as well as shows with constantly changing story lines, has caused attention spans to decrease. Such claims have only increased with the rise of social media platforms like TikTok, on which content has shortened to seconds-long videos that change constantly, causing attention spans to shrink even more. Many experts contend that using digital technology such as smartphones and tablets negatively affects attention span because the brain becomes overwhelmed from all the different stimuli. Others note that technology can be used to help increase attention span, as focusing on some video games can help a person learn to block out other stimuli.
Research on how long people focus has been somewhat controversial. Some studies have claimed that many people have attention spans shorter than the nine seconds of focus a goldfish is known to have. Other studies have shown it to be considerably longer and measured in minutes, with longer attention spans noted when people are doing something in which they are interested and distractions are limited. Research in the twenty-first century has focused on the decrease in attention spans in the digital age. Studies have revealed that the average amount of time people can stay focused on a screen fell from 150 seconds in 2004 to 47 seconds in 2020.
A person’s attention span is important because it affects how much information a person remembers and retains, and how well the information is processed. A person who is not paying adequate attention will miss aspects of the subject, and stimuli that are not noticed will not be stored in memory as efficiently or thoroughly as factors that are fully observed. The distractions that limit attention may also be encoded as part of the memories and can create mental clutter that affects recall. The length of attention spans is also important for people in marketing, sales, politics, education, medicine, and other fields in which people want to share a message with others. Knowing how long people pay attention to different stimuli and how to limit distractions can help get these messages across.
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