Assessing the Impact of Different Social Media Video Content Formats on Sustained Attention and Working Memory

Sludge content, also called 'overstimulation videos', is a novel social media content format that combines multiple, unrelated clips/videos/text posts that play simultaneously on a single, split screen. This kind of content has been shown to drive up user engagement on media sites due to its unpredictability and very short duration, which suits the cycle of 'doomscrolling', that is, persistent, aimless scrolling through media content that requires low cognitive effort and provides a variety of intermittent and fast stimulation.

The present study experimentally investigated the impact of sludge media content viewing on individuals' performance on tasks of sustained attention and working memory.

Participants with high media usage (n = 45) were randomly assigned to one of three experimental groups: those viewing (a) sludge media content, (b) regular short-video media content, and (c) no media content, while participants with low media usage (n = 3) were assigned to view sludge media content. All participants completed the continuous performance task for sustained attention assessment and the 2-Back task for working memory assessment before and after viewing. The performance of the groups before and after viewing the respective contents was then compared across the pre- and post-test conditions.

The results showed that while the three groups differed with respect to their performance on the sustained attention task following different forms of media content viewing, they did not differ with respect to the working memory task. Furthermore, sludge content viewing led to the greatest decline in scores from pre-test to post-test on the sustained attention task.

The findings thus indicated that sludge content viewing had a significant impact on sustained attention capacity but not working memory capacity.