Anyone who has lost an evening to a feed knows the feeling: minutes dissolve, and little remains. Zhuanghua Shi, who leads the Multisensory Perception Lab at LMU's Chair of Neuro-Cognitive Psychology, has recreated scrolling under laboratory conditions to find out why. Participants viewed comparable content while actively scrolling, passively watching, or looking at a single stable image, with EEG caps recording brain activity and eye trackers following their gaze.
In preliminary data from about 20 participants, both dynamic conditions made time feel shorter than the stable image, and scrolling compressed it further: 40 seconds of content was judged at around 30 seconds when watched passively and around 27 seconds when scrolled. Fixations became shorter and more frequent. Intriguingly, active scrolling preserved memory somewhat better than passive viewing, perhaps because users choose their own path through the content.
The effects outlast the session. Attention lingers on the previous task, a phenomenon known as attentional residue, and the reward system keeps prompting another check; roughly twenty minutes of continuous activity such as walking or conversation is often needed to refocus. Shi suggests fragmented attention may thin out the memories that shape our sense of how life unfolds, and argues the evidence favours delaying adolescents' access to social media rather than banning it outright.