Cognitive and mental health correlates of short-form video use

I personally believe that consuming a lot of short form video in lieu of doing more engaging activities is highly likely to worsen cognition and attention, but to be clear this paper isn't making that claim.

This is the classic correlation, not causation, meta-analysis. They acknowledge that several times throughout:

> Although some longitudinal studies have provided insight into the directionality between social media use and cognitive functioning (e.g., Sharifian & Zahodne, 2020), it remains possible that underlying cognitive differences shape how individuals engage with SFVs. Those with lower baseline cognitive functioning may gravitate toward highly stimulating, low-effort content or find it more difficult to disengage from continuous streams of short videos (e.g., Ioannidis et al., 2019). Moreover, underlying factors such as anxiety, depression, or attentional difficulties may shape both the nature of SFV use and cognitive performance, contributing to the associations observed in the current synthesis (Baumgartner, 2022; Dagher et al., 2021; Xiong et al., 2024).

Usually any correlational study causes the comment section to immediately fill with "correlation is not causation" comments followed by the "I don't trust meta analyses" crowd with a sampling of people complaining the sample size (of the individual studies) was too small. But nearly every comment I see is assuming causality and directionality. I see this topic strikes a nerve.

It would have been nice to see at least an attempt to include other forms of video content: Long-form YouTube videos, TV shows, movies. That wouldn't show causality either, but it would be a useful data point to check if this effect is really unique to short form video or if the correlation holds for anyone watching a lot of video.

Attention is all they need.

I think you should watch at whatever speed you best ingest the material. Don't get me wrong, some lectures I watch at 2x but it isn't about optimizing speed. It's about optimizing attention. I go faster if the speaker is too slow and/or too monotone so my mind starts drifting. Speeding up can force me to concentrate and not drift but the right speed is dependent in many factors that it can't be a hard rule. Regardless of the speed, in a lecture video I'll pause and rewind. That's the large benefit to them, though at the cost of being unable to engage and interact.

There's no deficit of time in the day, the deficit is in energy and attention. I'm worried we conflate speed and productivity (I'm unsure if you do or don't) but these are original. Speed gives the illusion of productivity but it is ignorant of quality and efficiency. It's only a first order approximation of productivity and a noisy one at best. Velocity is more important, as it requires direction but even velocity is ignorant of momentum, acceleration, force, and many other factors that go into making one productive. Speed is only important if everything else is held constant.

Let's not confuse speed for productivity. I'd argue that is a major contributing factor that has gotten us to this point. Where everything appears to move fast but in reality moves slower than ever

I would wager some VP at YouTube in charge of shorts has their performance evaluations tied to how many hours of shorts are watched. So that's one incentive. Another is customer retention. Make current paying users addicted to shorts, and maybe they'll be more likely to keep paying.

> This I only write because people sometimes get in to an obsessive social media cutting frenzy spending effort that would improve their lives much quicker spent fixing diet or exercise.

Not cutting social media would make these difficult-- e.g., limiting exercise to just stationary machines where they can watch Tiktok and reach their dopamine hit goals for the day.