Isn’t it scary to think that a goldfish actually has a larger attention span than a human? What 
happened? When did we lose the ability to focus on something for more than 8 seconds? By the way, in case you’re wondering the goldfish holds its attention for 9 seconds, sad that a goldfish is one-upping humans.
For this blog we were asked to perform an activity that would test our attention and those of others. I found a game online known as ‘Ancient Writing’. The task is that you are given two rows of ancient symbols and you must pay attention and select from the bottom row what is not in the top row, you have 15 s
econds per round and there may be more than one different symbol.
At the end of the game you are given your results that indicate your accuracy and your response time. I tested this out on myself (aged 20) my brother (aged 22) and my mum (aged 48). I completed the task in my room with no TV; no music around, hoping that silence would work best for me. I got my mum to conduct hers in the TV room where the bachelorette was on in th
e background and my brother did his in his room also in silence. Now taking a look at these results, can you guess who was in silence and who was watching TV? That’s right, my mum only got a 38% accuracy rating, whereas both my bother and I had higher results. What was interesting is that I received the highest accuracy of 95% meaning that my attention is pretty well, but my response time was lower then both my mothers and brothers. I believe this is due to my tendency to want to get things right so I took my time. Once the game was conducted the first time, we each did it again but swapped the place we completed the task, my brother and I were in the TV room, my mum in the silence of another room. What we found was that my brothers and I’s result only dropped slightly, whereas my mums went up to over 70%. Could this mean that as we get older distractions such as televisions take a larger tool than expected?
I originally believed that one of the reasons that our attentions has dropped so much is because we are a generation where our world has revolved so much around technology we have to many options to us focused. This is because we are multi-screeners. Google produced ‘The New Multi-screen World: Understanding Cross-platform Consumer Behaviour’ where they outlined out facts about the multiscreen generation:
- We are a nation of multi-screeners where most media time is spent in front of a screen
- The device we use is driven by our context
- We are either sequential screening (move between devices) or simultaneous screening (use multiple screens at the same time)
- TV cannot hold our full attention
- Portable devices aid our use of multi-screening
- When we use devices simultaneously, our attention is
- Smartphones are the backbone of our media interactions (I bet that’s a shock to all you…)
And finally – this one I found funny- especially since multi-screening is my gateway to procrastination…
- Using multiple screens makes us feel more efficient as we get a sense of accomplishment
Taking those facts into consideration, do you believe that there’s a connection between multi-screening and our attention downfall? Alyson Gausby, Microsoft Canada’s Consumer Insights Lead had her own assumption on whether being online made a difference to attention; her opinion didn’t make my original thought.
“I would have thought spending more time online or with media in general would heighten one’s ability to filter out distractions. Wrong again, not the case. No matter what environment humans are in (be it the plains of Africa or a crowded street in New York), survival depends on being able to focus on what’s important- generally what’s moving. The skill hasn’t changed, it’s just moved online” (Microsoft 2015).
So as it seems, our attention isn’t hindered purely by our massive screen use – which can be 4.4 hours a day just on leisure activities (Google 2012) – but our actual skill level. It does make sense I guess, since we all believe that we’re great at multitasking. So where do you stand? Does multi-screening make your attention longer or shorter? And most importantly, do you think a goldfish has a larger attention span than you?
Talk soon,
Natasha xx
References:
Consumer Insights Microsoft Canada 2015, Attention Spans, Microsoft Canada, viewed 27 September 2015, <https://moodle.uowplatform.edu.au/pluginfile .php/490916/mod_resource/content/1/microsoft-attention-spans-research-report.pdf>.
Google 2012, The New Multi-screen World: Understanding Cross-platform Consumer Behaviour, Google, viewed 27 September 2015, < https://ssl.gstatic.com/think/docs/the-new-multi-screen-world-study_research-studies.pdf>.
Natasha Nikoloska 