One of the great themes that reveals the scientific community are the changes in the sustained human attention capacityboth from psychological perspectives and from neuroscience, to measure the effects of distractions in our brain.
The psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of Chicago in Illinois, Monica Rosenbergwas declared winner of the award 2026 Young Investigator Award, awarded by the Society of Cognitive Neuroscience to recognize the contributions of the youngest researchers, who embark on the challenge of studying the most complex and enigmatic organ of the human body.
Graduated with two PhDs, in computational neuroscience and neurobiology, she currently teaches as an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Chicago.
A magazine article Nature highlighted Rosenberg’s findings, focused on developing models that predict attention and cognition from functional neuroimaging data, with the aim of investigating how attention fluctuates over time and how it interacts with the rest of the mind.
What is the «rewarding digital environment»: rewards for the brain
Each generation is affected by new technologies and constant stimuli of the environment. «Now we are in the digital agewhere both the amount of information available and the speed of access to it have changed,» he stated Gloria Marka psychologist at the University of California at Irvine, who monitored office workers who used computers daily for two decades.
One of the key factors has to do with the nature of the distractions that compete for our attentionwhich were also changing.
«The modern environment not only imposes distractions, but bombards us with alternatives that offer rewards more immediate,» Mark said.
People switch tasks so frequently and readjust their attention faster and faster, even without realizing it. «If the alternatives are really rewarding and of great value to the brain, then it will be very difficult to focus on something else that will require more subjective effort,» he argued. Michael Estermana neuroscientist at Boston University in Massachusetts.
«Notifications, messages, and social media posts «provide the brain with bursts of social validation, novelty, and information.», Mark adds.
This is where the concept of «rewarding digital environments» comes from, which could be altering our attention habitsincluding the tendency to become distracted even in the absence of obvious distractions.
Sources of interruption are not exclusively external, such as the sound of an incoming message. «It is almost as likely that people interrupt themselves like being interrupted«Mark explained.
The group of experts found that when external interruptions decrease, internal interruptions tend to increase. That pattern suggests that distraction and constant shifting of attention can become habit-forming and lead to further fragmentation of attention.
The results suggest that people switch tasks more frequently than in previous decades, and that this switching is often detrimental to performance.
But then, if we manage to eliminate distractions from the environment, is it possible to regain concentration? That is the question that neuroscientists are trying to answer, because there is still little evidence that the brain’s fundamental ability to concentrate has been affected.
The scientific concern is not only the duration of attention: how it impacts our performance also matters
«There are so many people who say they feel like they can’t pay attention, they say they’re constantly distracted, their attention jumps from one thing to another, and they can’t concentrate,» said Nilli Lavie, a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London.
In a 2021 survey of more than 2,000 UK adults, including teachers, students and workers, almost half said they felt their attention span was shorter than before.
In 2025, when novelist Elif Shafak questioned why TED talks were getting shorter, the argument was that «the world’s average attention span has shrunk.»
Those mentioned in the prestigious scientific journal are not isolated facts or data. «I think there is a huge disconnect between what we feel is happening and what it’s really happening”said Rosenberg.
The researcher makes a distinction between people’s attention span, that is, the intrinsic ability to concentrate on a specific task, with respect to their behavior in the real world, what they really focus on at any given moment.
«The ability to pay attention is the result of several brain processes: sustained attention, the ability to stay focused on a task for a long time; selective attention, the ability to prioritize certain information and ignore the rest; and executive control, the ability to direct attention toward a goal rather than toward what is most tempting,» Rosenberg explained.
When they talk about «high value» they refer to a personal point of view of each human being, where their experience, their life history and their personality make up their perception of which content is worth their time and which is not.
«It’s not so much that human biology has changedbut rather of a change in habits. And the question is to what extent those habits are reversible“said Nelson Cowan, a psychologist at the University of Missouri in Columbia.
In other words, scientists consider that we still have the ability to pay attention as a characteristic of our brain structure, but what is changing is how we cope with distractions and what kind of impact they have on our performance in the tasks we do every day.
The distractions of the real world
In scientific terms, human attention span is measured under controlled laboratory conditions, where the performance on a task over time.
Volunteers look at a screen showing sequences of letters and shapes and try to identify specific changes. Numerous laboratory studies revealed how performance generally decreases after ten minutes.
But the pattern of decline is not uniform: even in the face of apparently strong attention there are natural fluctuations, with moments of good performance, lapses and recovery.
Additional evidence shows that providing a distracting environment, such as playing sounds of babies crying and dogs barking, worsens people’s performance on cognitive tasks. This lays the foundation for understanding distractions in the real world.
Those who said they frequently consulted several media outlets simultaneously obtained worse results on the tests. selective attentionshowing greater difficulty in filtering irrelevant information.
At this point, the interpretations of these results are not unanimous. The correlations could simply reflect that people with different attentional tendencies They tend to change focus more frequently.
For now, scientific observations do not demonstrate that the digital environment has causally altered their brains. There is no convincing data in laboratory tests to support the idea that people have become less able to concentrate.
Although diagnoses of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) have increased in recent years, researchers attribute this increase to access to assessment and diagnostic practices, rather than an internal change in people’s attention span.
Attention span in front of screens, according to science: 47 seconds
The studies of Mark, the psychologist mentioned above, are based on direct observation and digital monitoring. The average duration of attention to a single task is constantly decreasing. «We know that the attention span in front of screens has decreased significantly,» he said.
Mark set out to measure how often workers switch between tasks, such as opening a new browser tab, checking email and switching from one document to another, as well as checking their cell phone.
In the mid-2000s, he observed that workers spent approximately two and a half minutes on average on a specific on-screen task before switching. By the 2010s, that time was reduced to about 75 seconds, and in early 2020 it was set at about 47 seconds.
In the midst of the «culture of urgency» and «digital saturation», some studies cited by National Geographicdated 2026, lower that figure to 40 seconds as the average duration of the capacity for sustained attention.
For Mark, this frequent change of attention comes with a cognitive cost. «When people switch attention, and especially when they do so fairly quickly, as the data indicates, they tend to commit more errors«he explained.
«We are not using the skills of reflection, deliberation and working memory,» he added. Being very busy with several things at the same time and progressing in the tasks we have to do do not go hand in hand.
«It takes them longer to complete any task than if they did it sequentially, and the stress increases because constant change also diverts the type of mental effort used,» he indicated.
Is our brain changing in the digital age?
The article of Naturesigned by David Adam, mentions that real-world studies, like Mark’s, are too complex to generate reliable data on specific aspects of brain function and the impact on neuroplasticity.
This constant change in the environment, typical of the digital age, may be related to weaker executive control that could have long-term implications for the brain.
Through magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and behavioral tests, there is some evidence that people with greater gray matter volume perform better on tasks that require maintaining concentration and resisting distractions.
Discover reliably if the ability to control attention is linked to the fire structural differences in the brainspecifically the amount of gray matter in regions of the frontal cortex, will be the subject of analysis in future research.
