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People Pay Attention Better Today Than 30 Years Ago - Really.
(www.scientificamerican.com)
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this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2023
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How lucky we have trained professionals employed to check if it actually is!
That way they can check on it, and you can just read their report when they're done.
They take on all the hard work, and you can simply read if and how they figured out it's a serious measure. What a time to be alive!
Alright, so I did some reading of the research.
The attention part is “The task is to cross out all target characters (a letter “d” with a total of two dashes placed above and/or below), which are interspersed with nontarget characters (a “d” with more or less than two dashes, and “p” characters with any number of dashes).”
The participants are usually given 20 seconds per line and a total of 10 minutes. A controlled environment where the only thing you can do is this task seems like it measures some kind of attention but it might be not be generalizable.
I think the problem is that attention means a lot of different things. Often when people complain about lack of attention it’s within the context of the many distractions we have in the modern world.
So the scientific claim is “adult participants have gotten moderately better at the d2 attention task” but the article says “people are paying more attention”. To me that seems like clickbait from what is otherwise a reasonable meta analysis.
Agreed, and unfortunately almost all science "reporting" has this problem.
Which is why we don't listen to people who haven't at least read the source material, and ideally have read and understood enough about the field and methods to be able to evaluate if they are reasonable for the task.
Your implication that a study by "trained professionals" is proof of this is hilarious. Many professionals disagree strongly about the values of IQ tests, among many other subjects of scientific studies. A simple Google search would show you that OP's opinion on IQ tests is also held by many other "trained professionals".
A quick read of the first paragraphs of the article also shows that it's not the IQ tests that are the measure for concentration.