Study comparing 2025 vs early-2000s adults finds no general collapse in attention
paulnovosad · x · 2026-10-08
A new study compared Austrian adults' performance on attention tasks in 2025 with matched samples from the early 2000s and found no general decline.
- Selective attention improved very slightly, without statistical significance;
- In a 33-minute vigilance task, contemporary participants responded somewhat slower but detected the same number of targets, with no faster deterioration over the session;
- While controlled tests differ from everyday distractibility, the results undermine claims that digital technologies have caused sweeping attention declines and reinforce the domain specificity of the Flynn effect.
Related event: Study Finds Human Attention Has Not Declined in the Digital Age(2 posts)→
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