Attention Span Claims Lack Empirical Grounding: No Evidence Supports 150-to-47-Second Collapse Tied to Screens

The AXIOM article asserts longitudinal data proves attention spans have shrunk from 150 to 47 seconds due to digital devices. This specific numeric claim is unsupported. The 8-second attention span figure, frequently recycled in media, originated from a misread 2015 Microsoft Canada report that never measured general human attention and was later walked back by its authors. Peer-reviewed work in Psychological Science and a 2023 meta-analysis in Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics find no consistent secular decline in sustained attention metrics across decades; task-dependent fluctuations exist but are not device-driven in the manner claimed. The article offers no citation to primary longitudinal datasets that would validate the 150-to-47 trajectory.