What is the average attention span of adults

As it turns out, a lack of discipline or motivation is not to blame for a short attention span. According to most studies, the average adult has a maximum attention span of about 20 minutes.

In one study, students self-reported lapses in attention, describing the duration of lapses and documenting their frequency. Students experienced lapses in attention up to 5 minutes in length, but shorter lapses were the most common. Lapses increased in frequency and duration as the course went on, clearly indicating that course length influenced overall focus levels. This study and others like it demonstrate what educators have known for years: even the best of students have a limited attention span, and for the best learning outcomes we must learn to work with it.

The answer is mixed. The potential distractions of incoming texts are real, but students are just as capable of paying attention as they were a decade ago - they simply gravitate toward a more hands-on, tech-connected learning experience.

From a college biology lesson to corporate training, an hour long learning session is almost guaranteed to result in distraction. And on the web? It is 6 seconds , one second shorter than that of a goldfish. Blame the iPhone, Facebook, Twitter…point fingers wherever you want, the reality is the same. For a public speaker , short attention spans present a unique problem. How do you get your audience to put down their phones and listen to you?

This requires including images and visual storytelling tactics that will capture and hold attention before something else does. That's why including an image with your social media posts delivers percent more engagement or percent more retweets. Words alone only have 10 percent recall, but adding a visual element increases retention of the content to 65 percent. Check out this infographic, created by Wyzowl , about what marketers can do to combine the visual and the story into their content to multiply its reach and conversion rates.

In fact, they think the idea that attention spans are getting shorter is plain wrong. She studies attention in drivers and witnesses to crime and says the idea of an "average attention span" is pretty meaningless. How much attention we apply to a task will vary depending on what the task demand is. There are some studies out there that look at specific tasks, like listening to a lecture. But the idea that there's a typical length of time for which people can pay attention to even that one task has also been debunked.

And those expectations and our experience directly mould what we see and how we process information in any given time. Some also suggest that evidence of ever-shorter shot lengths in films shows attention spans are dwindling. But the academic behind that research says all it shows is that film-makers have got better at trying to grab our attention. There's something else fishy about those attention span statistics too.

It turns out that there is no evidence that goldfish - or fish in general - have particularly short attention spans or memories, despite what popular culture suggests. I spoke to Prof Felicity Huntingford, who has spent almost half a century studying fish behaviour and just delivered a series of public lectures under the title, How Smart Are Fish? She says there have been literally hundreds of scientific papers over the decades on goldfish learning and memory.

I found a reference to a study on fish memory as early as