If your attention keeps getting pulled away, your memory and your learning feel it. That is close to a definition, not a finding: a memory can only be formed from what you actually took in.
The more useful question is what weakens attention in everyday life, and what the research can and cannot say about the cost. This article covers memory, learning, schoolwork and reading, and it is upfront about where the evidence runs out.
Does attention span affect memory?
Yes, because attention comes first. Information you only half noticed has little chance of being stored well, however good your memory is.
Working memory, the small mental workspace you use to hold a thought while you do something with it, is where this shows up most clearly. In one study, people did best on working-memory and fluid-intelligence tests when their phone was in another room, and worst when it sat on the desk. A pocket or bag landed in between. This held even when the phone was silenced and never touched. The effect was larger for people who were more dependent on their phones.
Later replications found smaller or mixed effects, so treat it as one study that points in a direction. The idea is that part of your attention is quietly spent on not checking.
Source: Ward, Duke, Gneezy & Bos, "Brain Drain," Journal of the Association for Consumer Research (2017).
How does attention span affect learning?
Learning needs attention to stay on one thing long enough for it to stick, and several habits chip away at that.
One is switching. Heavy media multitaskers performed worse than light ones on task-switching and filtering tests. That is an association, so it cannot tell us whether multitasking causes the difference or whether people who struggle to filter are drawn to multitask.
Source: Ophir, Nass & Wagner, PNAS (2009).
Another is format. A 2026 study in Communications Psychology compared learning from short videos with learning from longer ones. Short videos were followed by lower immediate memory accuracy and faster forgetting. Brain activity also showed less synchrony in regions tied to attention and episodic memory.
Source: Wei et al., Communications Psychology (2026).
A third is simply how often attention gets broken. In her recent studies, Gloria Mark found people stay on a single screen for about 47 seconds on average before switching. That figure describes behaviour, not a limit on what you are capable of. It does show how rarely attention gets a long, uninterrupted run.
Source: Gloria Mark, Attention Span (2023).
How does attention span affect academic performance?
The honest answer is that the research here does not give a clean number, and I would be wary of anyone who offers one.
What we can say is narrower. The things that schoolwork depends on, such as sustained attention, working memory and self-control, are the same things the studies above measure. A large meta-analysis of 71 studies, covering about 98,299 people, found that heavier short-form video use was linked to poorer attention and, most strongly, poorer inhibitory control. It was also linked to more stress and anxiety. Inhibitory control is the ability to hold back the pull of something more appealing than the task in front of you, which is much of what studying is.
This is correlational, so it does not show that videos cause weaker attention.
Source: Nguyen et al., Psychological Bulletin (2025).
So the reasonable reading is that the ingredients of study are plausibly affected. How much that shows up in a given person's results depends on everything else in their life.
Does attention span affect reading?
Probably, but the facts I can stand behind do not test reading directly, so I will not claim they do.
What reading needs is the same as everything above: staying with one thread long enough to build meaning, and resisting the pull to check something. Notifications can interrupt that. In one study, social media notifications arriving during a focus task caused a brief slowdown in processing. The size of the slowdown tracked how many notifications people got and how habitually they checked, not their total screen time.
A pause of a moment, repeated through a chapter, is the kind of cost that adds up. That is an inference from how attention works, not a reading study.
Source: Fournier et al., "Attention hijacked," Computers in Human Behavior.
Is attention a fixed trait, or can it recover?
It is more flexible than the word "span" suggests, and the best evidence comes from a randomised trial.
In 2025, Castelo and colleagues blocked mobile internet on the smartphones of 467 participants for two weeks. Calls and texts still worked. Sustained attention improved by an amount comparable to about 10 years of age-related decline, alongside better mental health and subjective well-being. Increased nightly sleep was one of the mechanisms.
That does not mean every two-week break fixes everything. It does suggest that attention responds to changes in the environment, at least in this trial's setting.
Source: Castelo et al., PNAS Nexus (2025).
What helps attention, memory and learning in practice?
None of this needs willpower heroics. Most of it is changing what is within reach.
- Move the phone out of the room when you study or read. The work you are doing is the one thing you want the phone not to be competing with.
- Silence what you do not need. Fewer notifications means fewer interruptions you never chose.
- Take notes by hand or in your own words rather than snapping photos of material. In one study, taking photos of museum objects impaired memory of them.
- Give one task one block of time. Constant switching is a habit worth cutting back.
- Protect sleep. It was one of the mechanisms in the two-week trial, and in a meta-analysis of 21 cohort studies, each extra hour of daily screen time was associated with a later bedtime and slightly less sleep.
Source for the photo study: Henkel, Psychological Science (2014).
Source for the sleep finding: He et al., Frontiers in Psychiatry (2025).
If you want help with the gap that opens when you stop reaching, Boredom's Daily Reset is a few guided minutes for exactly that. It is optional, and the list above works without it.
The short version
Attention decides what gets stored, so anything that fragments it tends to weaken memory and learning. The research links phone presence, notifications, multitasking and heavy short-form video to worse attention, working memory or processing speed, and short-form video to faster forgetting, though much of it is correlational or small.
The encouraging part is that attention can respond to its surroundings. In one randomised trial, two weeks without mobile internet on the phone improved sustained attention.