Social Media and Attention Span: Does Scrolling Really Shorten Your Attention?

Author: Ukrainian Psychological Hub · Published: September 27, 2026 · Editorial Policy

If it feels harder to stay with a book, lecture, meeting, movie, or single work task after spending a long time scrolling, the experience is real. The scientific explanation is more precise than the viral claim that social media has simply “destroyed” or permanently shortened everyone’s attention span.

Current evidence does not establish a universal, permanent reduction in a single thing called “attention span” caused by social media. What research does show is a more complicated pattern: notifications can interrupt ongoing processing; rapid context changes can produce immediate task-switching and memory costs; heavier media multitasking is associated with some measures of poorer cognitive control; problematic social media use is associated with inattention-related symptoms; and short-form video research increasingly finds associations with attention and inhibitory-control outcomes. The strength and meaning of these findings depend on the behavior being measured, the task, age, content, context, sleep, individual differences, and whether the study is cross-sectional, longitudinal, or experimental.

That distinction matters. Time spent on social media, number of app openings, passive scrolling, active messaging, media multitasking, problematic use, notification exposure, and rapid short-video swiping are different exposures. Likewise, sustained attention, selective attention, inhibitory control, working memory, task switching, distractibility, and the subjective feeling that “I can’t focus” are different outcomes. Treating all of them as one variable produces confident headlines and weak science.

Does Social Media Shorten Your Attention Span? The Short Answer

There is no strong evidence that ordinary social media use universally and permanently “shortens attention span” in the way the phrase is commonly understood. There is, however, credible evidence for narrower effects and associations.

A large 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis of short-form video research, covering 98,299 participants across 71 studies, found that greater short-form video use was associated with poorer cognitive outcomes overall, with some of the strongest associations involving attention and inhibitory control. The authors synthesized heterogeneous studies, so the result is evidence of an association across the literature rather than proof that scrolling directly caused a lasting cognitive change in every participant. Nguyen et al., 2025

A 2026 systematic review focused on young people found similar concerns but also made the evidence limitations unusually clear: most included short-form-video studies were cross-sectional, and the certainty of many conclusions remained low. Ebster et al., 2026 A separate 2026 systematic review of social media use, inattention, and impulsivity in adolescents likewise concluded that the literature is dominated by cross-sectional designs and heterogeneous measures, which limits conclusions about direction and causality. Fabio & Picciotto, 2026

So the best-supported answer is not “nothing happens” and not “scrolling ruins the brain.” Social media can alter the attentional demands of the moment, can become part of habits that repeatedly interrupt goal-directed activity, and is associated with some attention-related difficulties at the group level. Whether repeated use produces durable trait-level change, for whom, through which mechanisms, and under which patterns of use remains an active research question.

“Attention Span” Is Not One Scientific Variable

In everyday speech, “attention span” can mean almost anything from “how long I can read without checking my phone” to “how long a child can sit through class.” Cognitive research usually separates that bundle into more specific processes.

Sustained attention is the ability to maintain task-relevant processing over time. Selective attention is the ability to prioritize relevant information while limiting interference from competing input. Inhibitory control helps suppress a prepotent or distracting response. Working memory keeps task-relevant information available while it is being used. Task switching concerns the reconfiguration needed when moving between task sets. Cognitive load concerns how much limited processing capacity a task is demanding. Subjective difficulty concentrating is a person’s experienced sense of effort or fragmentation, which does not map perfectly onto any single laboratory measure.

This is why a person can feel “less focused” while still performing adequately on a particular attention task, or perform worse on one component of cognitive control without showing a generalized loss of attention. A 2026 study comparing college students with and without problematic short-video use, for example, found a difference in the orienting component of an attention-network task but not a uniform decline across alerting and executive-control components. Li, Samah, & Liu, 2026

The phrase “shorter attention span” therefore works as a search query and a description of experience. It should not be treated as a single neurological measurement.

What Social Media Can Do to Attention in the Moment

The clearest causal evidence in this area often concerns immediate disruption rather than permanent change.

Notifications can interrupt ongoing processing

A 2026 experiment examined smartphone-style social media notifications while participants performed a Stroop task. Notifications were followed by a brief slowdown in cognitive processing, lasting roughly seven seconds on average. The magnitude of disruption varied with perceived relevance and habitual patterns of interaction, including notification frequency and checking behavior. Fournier et al., 2026

That is an experimentally observed interruption cost. It does not mean every notification removes seven seconds from a fixed daily supply of attention, and it does not establish that receiving notifications permanently damages attention. It shows that a salient cue can temporarily compete with an ongoing task.

This distinction is central to digital distraction: a person can repeatedly lose task continuity because the environment creates many opportunities to redirect attention, even when their underlying capacity for sustained attention has not been shown to have permanently changed.

Rapid context switching can create immediate cognitive costs

Some social-media formats ask users to process a sequence of unrelated contexts within seconds: a joke, a political clip, a dance, a health claim, a private message, an advertisement, then another video. Laboratory research suggests that this rapid switching can matter for specific cognitive tasks.

In a 2023 between-subjects experiment, participants who used a TikTok-style short-video feed during an interruption performed worse on a prospective-memory task than participants exposed to Twitter, YouTube, or no intervening activity. Prospective memory is the ability to remember and carry out an intended action later; it is not the same thing as “attention span,” but the result demonstrates that feed format and context switching can affect cognition in the short term. Chiossi et al., 2023

A 2025 randomized experiment also reported preliminary evidence that 30 minutes of TikTok-style short-form video exposure reduced cue-based preparation on a subsequent task-switching paradigm compared with a documentary or passive control condition. The study was small, with 72 participants, and its authors appropriately described the finding as preliminary. Luo et al., 2025

These studies support a specific proposition: rapid, high-switching digital activity can change performance on particular tasks immediately afterward. They do not establish irreversible attentional decline.

What Longer-Term Research Shows

Longer-term questions are harder because people choose their media, and those choices are related to personality, mental health, developmental stage, sleep, social environment, existing attention difficulties, and countless other variables.

Media multitasking is associated with some cognitive-control differences

Media multitasking means using multiple streams of media, or combining media with another task, rather than merely spending time on social media. A 2021 meta-analysis spanning 118 assessments found a small overall association between heavier media multitasking and poorer cognitive control, with substantial heterogeneity across measurement methods and cognitive outcomes. The authors emphasized that the literature still did not establish a simple causal account. Parry & le Roux, 2021

A 2023 three-level meta-analysis of adolescents and young adults found a moderate negative association between media multitasking and cognitive control, with poorer inhibitory control and working-memory performance among heavier media multitaskers, while cognitive flexibility did not differ significantly. Kong et al., 2023

An earlier meta-analysis of experimentally manipulated media multitasking found negative effects on cognitive outcomes during multitasking conditions, with effects varying by user control, task relevance, and other features. Jeong & Hwang, 2016

These findings are relevant because social media is often used while studying, working, watching television, talking with someone, or switching among apps. They should not be collapsed into a claim that “social media shortens attention span.” Media multitasking is its own exposure and has its own evidence base.

Problematic use is different from high-frequency use

Research on problematic social media use generally asks about dysregulated patterns such as difficulty controlling use, persistent use despite negative consequences, preoccupation, or interference with functioning. A person can spend substantial time on social media without meeting a research definition of problematic use, and a high score on a screening scale is not itself a clinical diagnosis.

A 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis of 15 studies involving 35,223 participants found a moderate association between problematic social media use and ADHD symptomatology. Ding, Liu, & Chao, 2025 That association is important, but it does not show that social media causes ADHD. Existing attention difficulties may increase vulnerability to dysregulated digital use; dysregulated use may worsen sleep or create more interruptions; shared factors may contribute to both; and reciprocal effects are possible.

The American Psychiatric Association states that technology addictions such as social-media addiction are not currently disorders identified in DSM-5-TR; Internet Gaming Disorder is listed as a condition for further study rather than as a general diagnosis covering social media or smartphones. American Psychiatric Association, 2024 The World Health Organization formally recognizes gaming disorder in ICD-11, which is a different behavioral category from ordinary social-media use. World Health Organization, 2020

For this article, “problematic social media use” is therefore treated as a research construct. Time spent, frequent checking, distress, impaired control, and functional impairment should not be used interchangeably.

Longitudinal evidence is becoming more informative, but it is not a simple causal verdict

A 2025 longitudinal study using data from roughly 12,000 participants in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study examined changes in social-media hours and cognitive performance over four years of early adolescence. Growth in social-media use was negatively coupled with growth in inhibitory control/attention and crystallized abilities, while it was positively coupled with processing speed. Carvalho & Ravindran, 2025

The domain-specific pattern is important. If social media merely “destroyed attention,” one would expect a much simpler story. Instead, different cognitive measures can move in different directions. Longitudinal coupling also remains observational: temporal data improve inference, but they do not automatically prove that changing social-media use caused the cognitive trajectory.

Why the Causal Story Is Harder Than the Headline

Several recurring problems make “social media caused shorter attention span” a stronger claim than most studies can support.

First, reverse causality is plausible. People who are already more distractible, impulsive, bored, stressed, sleep-deprived, or uncomfortable with sustained tasks may prefer faster-changing digital environments or check them more frequently.

Second, common causes can influence both media behavior and attention. Sleep, family stress, anxiety, depression, school demands, social isolation, personality, socioeconomic context, and pre-existing neurodevelopmental differences can all matter.

Third, exposure measurement is often crude. Self-reported “hours on social media” does not reveal whether the person was messaging friends, watching long educational videos, rapidly swiping short clips, creating content, reading, multitasking during homework, or keeping an app open in the background.

Fourth, many outcomes are self-reported too. A questionnaire about difficulty concentrating is informative, but it is not interchangeable with performance on a sustained-attention, inhibition, working-memory, or task-switching test.

Fifth, platform design and content change quickly. A finding from Facebook use in 2013 may not generalize cleanly to a TikTok-style feed in 2026. Even within one platform, two users can encounter very different content, social rewards, notification patterns, and interaction habits.

Sixth, developmental stage matters. Evidence from adolescents cannot be applied mechanically to adults, and evidence from college students cannot be assumed to describe children.

This is why high-quality guidance increasingly avoids treating “screen time” as a single toxic dose. The American Psychological Association’s advisory on adolescent social media use emphasizes that effects depend on the content, features, social context, and characteristics of the young person rather than being uniformly beneficial or harmful. American Psychological Association, 2023

Does Social Media Cause ADHD?

Current evidence does not establish that social media causes ADHD.

ADHD is a neurodevelopmental disorder diagnosed from a developmental pattern of symptoms and impairment, not from phone use, screen time, a social-media habit, or a score on a problematic-use scale. Research does find associations between problematic social media use and ADHD-related symptoms or traits. The 2025 meta-analysis by Ding and colleagues found a moderate correlation, while a 2026 systematic review of adolescents found that problematic use was more consistently associated with inattention and impulsivity than simple time-based use. Both literatures contain substantial cross-sectional evidence and cannot establish a one-way causal path from scrolling to ADHD. Ding, Liu, & Chao, 2025 Fabio & Picciotto, 2026

Someone who begins checking social media constantly and has trouble returning to work may have developed an interruption-heavy habit. Someone with lifelong, cross-situational difficulties involving attention, organization, impulsivity, or executive functioning may need a broader clinical assessment. Those are different questions.

Repeated smartphone checking is also not, by itself, proof of an ADHD diagnosis, an OCD compulsion, or any other mental disorder. Clinical interpretation depends on the pattern, history, function of the behavior, distress, impairment, and alternative explanations.

Does TikTok, Reels, or Shorts “Rewire the Brain”?

“Rewire the brain” is too vague to function as a scientific conclusion.

Learning and repeated experience are associated with neural adaptation; that is true of digital behavior, reading, music practice, exercise, navigation, and many other activities. But the fact that the brain is plastic does not show that short-video use produces a specific harmful rewiring, a permanently reduced attentional capacity, or a neurological state that can be inferred from how impatient someone feels during a long task.

The strongest recent short-form-video evidence supports a narrower statement. Greater use—especially problematic or highly intensive use—is associated with poorer performance or more difficulty in several attention and cognitive-control domains, while experiments show some immediate cognitive effects of rapid short-video exposure. The literature still contains substantial observational evidence and measurement heterogeneity. Nguyen et al., 2025 Ebster et al., 2026

For a focused review of this specific format, see Short-Form Video and Attention: What TikTok, Reels, and Shorts Research Shows.

The popular phrase “brain rot” makes an even broader claim by implication. It is an internet and cultural term, not a neurological or psychiatric diagnosis. Our evidence-based explanation is in Brain Rot: What the Term Means—and What Short Videos Really Do to Attention.

Why Scrolling Can Feel as If Your Attention Has Become Shorter

A person can experience real concentration difficulty without having suffered a permanent reduction in an underlying attentional capacity. Several pathways can produce that feeling.

One is interruption density. If the phone, browser, and social environment repeatedly present cues to switch, a long task contains more opportunities to leave it.

Another is learned checking. When opening an app is easy and occasionally produces socially or emotionally important information, checking can become a well-practiced response to boredom, uncertainty, effort, or pauses. That does not require a claim about “dopamine addiction.”

A third is contrast. A textbook chapter, spreadsheet, or lecture may unfold slowly and require internally maintained goals. A personalized feed can provide a new stimulus after a swipe. Moving directly from high-rate novelty to a low-novelty task can make the second task feel unusually effortful even when the person remains capable of doing it.

A fourth is task residue and switching cost. Repeatedly leaving a task can force the person to reconstruct what they were doing, what mattered, and what the next step was. Even short interruptions can therefore make work feel more mentally expensive.

A fifth is displacement. Late-night scrolling can reduce sleep opportunity; constant messaging can divide study time; prolonged social comparison can affect mood; and stress can itself interfere with concentration. In these cases, social media may be part of the pathway without being a direct cause of a permanent “attention span” change.

The broader mental-health context is covered in Social Media and Mental Health: Risks, Benefits, and What Research Shows.

Social Media Use, Screen Time, and Attention Are Not the Same Question

“Screen time” compresses activities with very different cognitive demands into a duration measure. Thirty minutes of rapid short-video swiping, a 30-minute video call with a friend, 30 minutes reading a long article, and 30 minutes composing a post are all screen time. They are not the same attentional exposure.

Even within scrolling, frequency and fragmentation may matter independently of total duration. The 2026 notification experiment by Fournier and colleagues found that disruption was related to notification relevance and interaction frequency rather than simply total device time. Fournier et al., 2026

This is why there is no defensible universal adult medical cutoff at which social-media minutes suddenly become an attention disorder. Duration can be useful context, but functional impact, type of activity, timing, content, frequency of interruption, developmental stage, and individual vulnerability provide different information.

Media Multitasking Is Adjacent to the Attention-Span Question

A common pattern is not simply “scrolling for two hours.” It is writing while checking messages, studying with a feed open, watching a show while using a second screen, or moving among social media, email, and work whenever effort rises.

That pattern deserves separate analysis because simultaneous or rapidly alternating tasks impose switching and interference demands. Meta-analytic evidence links heavier media multitasking with some poorer cognitive-control outcomes, but the literature is heterogeneous and still has causal limitations. Parry & le Roux, 2021 Kong et al., 2023

The practical implication is useful even before every long-term mechanism is settled: if your actual goal is to read, solve, write, listen, or learn, reducing competing task streams during that activity directly reduces the number of switches the task requires.

How to Tell Whether Social Media Is Affecting Your Focus

Instead of asking only “How many hours do I use social media?”, ask questions that map more closely onto function.

Can you begin an important task without automatically opening a feed first? How often do you leave a task because of a notification versus because you chose a planned break? When you switch to social media, do you return when intended? Are you using social media during activities that depend on sustained processing, such as studying, driving, meetings, or conversations? Does late-night use regularly displace sleep? Does the same concentration difficulty occur when the phone is absent? Is difficulty focusing present across settings and activities, including ones you enjoy? Has the pattern been present since childhood or did it appear recently? Does use cause meaningful impairment in school, work, relationships, safety, or daily responsibilities?

These questions separate exposure, habit, and impairment. They also help distinguish a digital-environment problem from a broader attention or mental-health problem.

High-frequency use alone does not answer the question. A creator, journalist, community manager, student, or geographically separated family may spend substantial time on social platforms for reasons that are not captured by an “addiction” narrative. Conversely, relatively little use can still be disruptive if it repeatedly occurs at moments when uninterrupted attention is essential.

What Helps If Scrolling Is Making It Harder to Focus?

The most defensible strategies target the mechanism you are actually experiencing rather than promising a universal “digital detox.”

Reduce unplanned interruptions

If notifications are the main trigger, disable or silence low-value alerts, use scheduled notification summaries where available, and let people who need urgent access use a separate channel. The goal is to control interruption timing, not to prove that notifications are medically harmful.

Separate focus from checking

Create a defined period in which the task and the feed do not compete. This can mean putting the phone out of immediate reach, closing social-media tabs, using a focus mode, or deciding that messages will be checked at a specific break. The useful variable is not moral discipline; it is the number of opportunities to switch.

Add stopping cues to feeds

Infinite feeds remove many of the natural endpoints that books, episodes, articles, or scheduled programs provide. You can add an endpoint yourself: one saved list, one message thread, a timer, a fixed number of videos, or a clear next appointment. A stopping cue turns “until I feel done” into a decision made before the most immersive part of the session.

Match the intervention to the format

If short-form video is the pattern associated with concentration difficulty, changing every form of digital communication may be unnecessary. If media multitasking is the problem, a single-task rule may matter more than reducing total social-media time. If late-night use is displacing sleep, timing may matter more than daytime minutes. If notifications are the main source of interruption, alert settings may matter more than deleting an account.

Practice returning, not merely resisting

The relevant skill is often recovering the goal after distraction. When you notice that you have switched unintentionally, return to the exact next action rather than turning the lapse into a judgment about self-control. Externalizing the next step—one sentence in a note, a visible checklist item, a cursor left at the next line—can lower the cost of resuming.

Use planned experiments rather than universal abstinence

Try a defined change for several days or weeks and observe a defined outcome: number of unplanned checks during study, pages read before switching, completed work intervals, bedtime, or subjective concentration. This gives you information about your own pattern.

A digital detox or social-media abstinence period can be useful for some people as an experiment or reset of routines. It should not be sold as a universal treatment that automatically improves anxiety, depression, sleep, attention, or well-being. A systematic review of interventions targeting media multitasking found that no intervention category consistently improved attention-related performance across studies. Parry & le Roux, 2019

When Concentration Problems Deserve a Broader Assessment

Consider a broader evaluation when concentration difficulties are persistent, occur across multiple contexts, meaningfully interfere with education, work, relationships, or safety, or are accompanied by other significant symptoms.

Attention problems can occur in ADHD, anxiety, depression, sleep disorders, substance-related problems, trauma-related conditions, medication effects, medical conditions, high stress, and ordinary periods of overload. A phone habit can coexist with any of these. Removing an app cannot determine which explanation is correct.

For children and adolescents, developmental history and functioning across home, school, and social settings are especially important. For adults, a new and substantial change in concentration deserves attention to timing, sleep, stress, mood, substances, medications, and medical factors rather than an automatic conclusion that social media is the cause.

What the Evidence Supports Right Now

The evidence supports five conclusions.

Social media can disrupt ongoing attention when it introduces salient notifications, encourages task switching, or becomes a competing activity during goal-directed work.

Heavier media multitasking and problematic forms of social-media or short-form-video use are associated with poorer outcomes on some attention and cognitive-control measures, although effect sizes and findings vary across studies and methods.

Experimental studies show immediate effects of some digital exposures on specific cognitive tasks, but these findings do not prove permanent reduction of a general attention capacity.

Longitudinal research is beginning to show that changes in social-media use and some cognitive trajectories can move together, particularly in adolescence, but observational longitudinal data still require cautious causal interpretation.

The claim that “scrolling permanently shortens everyone’s attention span” goes beyond the evidence. The scientifically useful question is more specific: which digital behavior, in which person, under which conditions, is interfering with which component of attention or daily functioning?

That question produces better research and better decisions.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does scrolling really shorten your attention span?

Research does not establish a universal, permanent shortening of a single attention span caused by scrolling. It does show that rapid switching, notifications, media multitasking, problematic use, and some short-form-video patterns are associated with or can experimentally affect specific attention-related processes.

Does TikTok reduce attention span?

TikTok-style short-form-video use has been associated with poorer attention and inhibitory-control outcomes in systematic reviews, and several experiments report short-term effects on specific cognitive tasks. Most of the broader literature remains observational, so it does not justify a claim that TikTok inevitably or permanently reduces attention capacity. See our dedicated short-form video and attention review.

Does social media cause ADHD?

Current evidence does not establish that social media causes ADHD. Problematic social-media use is associated with ADHD-related symptoms and traits, but association does not identify direction of causation. ADHD diagnosis requires a developmental clinical assessment and cannot be inferred from screen time or scrolling behavior.

Is “social media addiction” an official diagnosis?

Problematic social-media use and “social media addiction” are widely studied terms, but the American Psychiatric Association states that technology addictions such as social-media addiction are not currently disorders identified in DSM-5-TR. A screening score or a pattern of frequent use should therefore not be presented as a diagnosis. American Psychiatric Association, 2024

How long is a normal attention span?

There is no single universal adult attention-span number that functions as a medical cutoff. Performance depends on the task, motivation, fatigue, expertise, environment, developmental stage, and the specific component of attention being measured. Claims that every healthy person should focus for one fixed number of minutes oversimplify attention science.

Is the “eight-second attention span” claim scientific?

It should not be used as a general scientific rule for human attention. Attention is task-dependent and multidimensional, and cognitive research does not reduce healthy human attention to one universal stopwatch value.

Will deleting social media restore my attention?

It may reduce specific sources of distraction for some people, especially if social media is a major source of unplanned switching. Research does not support a guarantee that deletion or abstinence will automatically restore attention, improve mental health, or resolve an underlying clinical condition. A targeted experiment—changing notifications, timing, format, or multitasking—can provide more useful information about the mechanism affecting you.

Can I improve focus without quitting social media?

Often, yes. Reducing interruption frequency, separating focus periods from checking, adding stopping cues, limiting simultaneous media streams, and protecting sleep can change the conditions under which attention is repeatedly redirected. The relevant goal is functional control over when and how you engage, not an arbitrary zero-use standard.

Related Articles

• Social Media and Mental Health: Risks, Benefits, and What Research Shows

• Brain Rot: What the Term Means—and What Short Videos Really Do to Attention

• Short-Form Video and Attention: What TikTok, Reels, and Shorts Research Shows

• Media Multitasking: What It Is and How It Affects Attention, Memory, and Performance

• Digital Distraction: How Phones, Apps, and Online Environments Compete for Attention

References

American Psychiatric Association. (2024). What is technology addiction? https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/technology-addictions-social-media-and-more/what-is-technology-addiction

American Psychological Association. (2023). Health advisory on social media use in adolescence. https://www.apa.org/topics/social-media-internet/health-advisory-adolescent-social-media-use

Carvalho, C., & Ravindran, N. (2025). Associations between social media and crystallized and fluid performance trajectories in early adolescence. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 35(4), e70125. https://doi.org/10.1111/jora.70125

Chiossi, F., Haliburton, L., Ou, C., Butz, A., & Schmidt, A. (2023). Short-form videos degrade our capacity to retain intentions: Effect of context switching on prospective memory. Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Article 30. https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3580778

Ding, J., Liu, Z., & Chao, M. (2025). The association between problematic social media use and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder symptomatology: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Psychiatric Research, 189, 544–553. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpsychires.2025.07.009

Ebster, M., Lauerer, M., Nagel, E., & Schmidt, S. (2026). Taming the endless scroll? Short-form videos, digital routines and neurocognitive outcomes in youth: A systematic literature review. European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00787-026-03083-7

Fabio, R. A., & Picciotto, G. (2026). The relationship between social media use and adolescent inattention and impulsivity: A systematic review. Research in Developmental Disabilities, 169, 105237. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ridd.2026.105237

Fournier, H., Fournel, A., Osiurak, F., Koenig, O., Pâris, F., Gaujoux, V., & Ringeval, F. (2026). Attention hijacked: How social media notifications disrupt cognitive processing. Computers in Human Behavior, 179, 108926. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2026.108926

Jeong, S.-H., & Hwang, Y. (2016). Media multitasking effects on cognitive vs. attitudinal outcomes: A meta-analysis. Human Communication Research, 42(4), 599–618. https://doi.org/10.1111/hcre.12089

Kong, F., Meng, S., Deng, H., Wang, M., & Sun, X. (2023). Cognitive control in adolescents and young adults with media multitasking experience: A three-level meta-analysis. Educational Psychology Review, 35, 22. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-023-09746-0

Li, B., Samah, N. A., & Liu, T. (2026). The effect of problematic short-video use on attention networks among college students. Cognitive Processing. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-026-01382-0

Luo, W., Zhao, X., Jiang, B., Fu, Q., & Zheng, J. (2025). Swiping disrupts switching: Preliminary evidence for reduced cue-based preparation following short-form video exposure. Behavioral Sciences, 15(8), 1070. https://doi.org/10.3390/bs15081070

Nguyen, L., Walters, J., Paul, S., Monreal Ijurco, S., Rainey, G. E., Parekh, N., Blair, G., & Darrah, M. (2025). Feeds, feelings, and focus: A systematic review and meta-analysis examining the cognitive and mental health correlates of short-form video use. Psychological Bulletin, 151(9), 1125–1146. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000498

Parry, D. A., & le Roux, D. B. (2019). Media multitasking and cognitive control: A systematic review of interventions. Computers in Human Behavior, 92, 316–327. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2018.11.031

Parry, D. A., & le Roux, D. B. (2021). “Cognitive control in media multitaskers” ten years on: A meta-analysis. Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace, 15(2), Article 7. https://doi.org/10.5817/CP2021-2-7

World Health Organization. (2020). Addictive behaviours: Gaming disorder. https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/addictive-behaviours-gaming-disorder