this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2023
148 points (99.3% liked)
science
14885 readers
282 users here now
A community to post scientific articles, news, and civil discussion.
rule #1: be kind
<--- rules currently under construction, see current pinned post.
2024-11-11
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I have a hard time believing that an IQ test is a serious measure of attention.
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.