Is your attention span shorter than that of a goldfish?

Is your attention span shorter than a goldfish?

Last week’s viral science story was about a research experiment showing that smart phones have shrunk the human attention span to 8.25 seconds &#8212 which is “shorter than the attention span of a goldfish” the headline read. Which is 9 seconds.

I assume they meant actual goldfish, not the little cheese crackers. But it doesn’t matter because I have tried to find the source of this figure, for the attention span of a goldfish, and it’s just not there.

But here’s what I did find.

The research wasn’t really about attention spans in general, it was designed to test how long humans pay attention to the ads on web pages. And if we’re talking about ads, 8.25 seconds strikes me as pretty long.

Which is probably because the test subjects, as it turns out, were all Canadians. Who are genetically patient. If they’d tested Americans, you’d figure, what, 4 seconds? On the West Coast. On the East coast, probably two?

Anyway, they concluded that for people to pay attention to ads, the ads have to have movement. Because our peripheral vision is hard-wired to respond to movement as a way to alert us to predators.

So now more and more ads are like action films, and here’s the irony: these elaborate ads need massive amounts of data, so while you’re waiting for this irresistible attention-grabbing action-packed ad to load, you’re watching a download bar.

What the researchers should have measured is not how long are you willing to look at an ad, but how long you’re willing to look at a download bar. I’m betting it’s way less than eight seconds, even for a Canadian.