Attention Span and Directed Attention: Losing to Goldfish and the 10 Minute Rule

"You Now Have a Shorter Attention Span Than a Goldfish." Headlines like this one from TIME magazine, or similar ones from the New York Times, Huffington Post, and The Telegraph in the UK make you wonder at first if it’s really true. This catchy line came from a study conducted by Microsoft based on multimedia users’ performance on online games paired with monitoring brain activity. According to the study, humans’ attention spans have dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to now a mere 8 seconds; a goldfish supposedly has an attention span of 9 seconds. And it gets better: Microsoft claims that despite our fleeting attention in an increasingly digital world, the upside is that humans are getting better at multitasking and filtering through information due to the massive influx of information we have to process. Fortunately, about as soon as these articles came out, the science and research community quickly responded.

As I did my own wading through of online evidence from mythbusting (yes, The Discovery Channel did bust this!), to blogs from the scientific community, to passionate writers, it was hard to find any concrete consensus on this specific issue. Yet based on the literature we’ve read this term, I was already inclined to believe that there was something seriously fishy with this study. Besides questionable methods and cause vs. correlation error, there seemed to be a problem with conflating the role of memory and attention — the ability to recall information over the short or long term is not the same as focusing. Related concepts from our class include directed attention and fascination, which have clearly demonstrated that our attention capacity is a finite resource (James 1892; Kaplan 1978) and our inability to multitask effectively is non-negotiable, particularly with our many digital devices (Ophir et al. 2009). But how finite is directed attention? And what is the link to attention span?

In a chapter titled “Attention” in Brain Rules by John Medina (2008), we learn that humans actually have about a 10-minute attention limit, but stories and emotion can help keep an audience engaged for much longer in between 10 minute chunks. In other words, our directed attention seems to exist in these short segments as well. When we have to focus on something like a lecture or a long reading, we are most attentive for the first 10 minutes before we start to lose concentration.

This theory also appeals to attention restoration theory in interesting ways. Medina describes stories and appealing to emotion as helpful lifelines when attention is fading; and when thinking about the aspects of fascination and how our ancestors built mental models, there is a certain power to emotion and stories that makes a lot of sense. It’s as if these affective injections or brief tangents at 10 minute markers allow directed attention to rest momentarily while a kind of fascination kicks in. Still, this leads me to other questions concerning how attention works: Can emotion come from an excitement to learn or does it need to be based in first-hand experience? Also, do stories sometimes serve as distractions or force us to keep track of multiple strands of thought? I like the idea of stopping every 10 minutes, but I would imagine it requires a certain discipline for the person in charge to create a consistent, logical pattern for lectures.

All of this makes me wonder about why so much of our education system is still built around relatively long lectures and presentations. What if all lectures were limited to 10 minutes? Or what if one lecture was broken into smaller lectures with activities in between? It seems like educators could better leverage "task switching" and "being away" as a method for attention restoration, letting students process and work through material a little bit at a time before tackling a new concept. Flipped classrooms and active learning seem like promising techniques, but those tend to focus on ways of engaging students rather than on attention fatigue and attention restoration. To capitalize on opportunities in the classroom, I feel there should be more emphasis on how attention works, rather than putting the ownership on students to find better ways to pay attention and on teachers to design their most compelling lecture for each class. 


Surely if attention and focus are essential for learning, and our learning environments are not compatible for meeting our needs, we need to do something differently. This environment could be conceptual or even physical. Perhaps we need new lesson plans or in fact outdoor classrooms are the best place to learn. Any strategy gets even more complicated when we think about the vast variety among learning differences, diagnosed attention weaknesses and hyperactivity, and inconsistent educational training. So whether or not we can focus longer than a goldfish, it seems like there is an important take-away in making those ten minutes really count.


- Katie Williamson

Resources:

1. http://www.huffingtonpost.in/2015/05/17/human-attention-spans-now-lower-than-a-goldfish-microsoft-study/
2. http://time.com/3858309/attention-spans-goldfish/
3. http://www.brainrules.net/pdf/brainrules_summaries.pdf
4. James, W. (1892). Psychology: The Briefer Course. (Collier, 1962), Ch 13 - Attention (pp. 84-105).

5. Kaplan, S. (1978). Attention and Fascination: The Search for Cognitive Clarity. In S. Kaplan and R. Kaplan (Eds.) Humanscape. (pp. 84-90).

6. Ophir, E., Nass, C., & Wagner, A. (2009). Cognitive control in media multitaskers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition.
7. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/23/education/teaching-professors-to-become-better-teachers.html