Has attention reduced in last decades?
Are smartphones making us dumber?
Have you noticed how our smartphones have basically become extensions of our brains nowadays? These little pocket-sized devices have morphed into mini digital assistants that can handle everything from keeping our contacts and schedules organized to giving us instant access to the entire internet.
Need to split the bill after a night out? Boom, calculator app. Trying to find that hot new restaurant? Google Maps. Feeling bored and need some quick entertainment? Angrybirds. It's like our phones have become these all-powerful tools that can solve virtually any mental task or craving we throw their way.
But hold up, before we get too hyped on being cyber-augmented humans, there's a buzzkill crowd out there complaining on the intensive smartphone usage. I'm talking about those dramatic article titles screaming stuff like "Are Smartphones Making Us Dumber?" and "Is Your Smartphone Making You Fat and Lazy?" Modern connectedness is “rewiring our brains” to constantly crave instant gratification. Is it a threat for our cognitive skills as species?
Damn, could it be that our beloved smart devices are actually making us...dumber? That instead of boosting our brainpower, they're turning our grey matter into mush and making us more stupid who can't think, remember, focus, remember their couple’s phone number, or even control our feels? Maybe we should put down the phones once in a while after all... Are these simply examples of an older generation once again thinking its “progeny yet more corrupt?” (Horace, 20BC) or is there some evidential legitimacy to these fears?
Well, some weeks ago I wrote about nth review claiming that there's no correlation between mental health problems and Internet usage. Sometimes reality turns up to be reluctant to follow the Internet hype.
And in this post, I would like to present the conclusions of a cross-temporal meta-analytical review on the cognitive ability of attention 1. Has attention reduced in population due to the greater usage of screens and smartphones? This study was made based on data from 32 countries over a timespan of 31 years! This kind of studies are now so precious, as there is a great scarcity of longitudinal experiments on smartphones and screens technology.
In 1984, James Flynn showed evidence for systematically changing intelligence test scores in the USA, demonstrating an increase in average IQ scores from 1932 to 19782. This phenomenon has become known as the Flynn effect. While IQ increases averaged about 3 points globally per decade in the 1900s, gains appear to have decreased in their strength from around the late 1980s. In fact, some evidence from the late 1990s onwards points towards a stagnation and possibly even a reversal in several countries.
In order to check this hypothesis of population becoming stupid, authors of the article analyze data from Test of Attention, a well-established and widely-used measure of attention, from 1990 to 2021. Attention and concentration are a pair of correlated values with IQ scores. And the most important result of their article is following image:
Conclusions from authors claimed that:
A clear positive meaningful Flynn effect was observed for attention performance in adults. Some non-significant, but meaningful gains in concentration performance were observed for children.
Thus, although the working review doesn’t focus on smartphone usage, science strikes back again and violates the narrative that people are becoming stupid.
Andrzejewski, D., Zeilinger, E. L., & Pietschnig, J. (2024). Is there a Flynn effect for attention? Cross-temporal meta-analytical evidence for better test performance (1990–2021). Personality and Individual Differences, 216, 112417.
Flynn, J. R. (1984). The mean IQ of Americans: Massive gains 1932 to 1978. Psychological Bulletin, 95(1), 29–51. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.95.1.29
Flynn, J. R. (1987). Massive IQ gains in 14 nations: What IQ tests really measure. Psychological Bulletin, 101(2), 171–191. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.101.2.171