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Attention Span Exercises, and What They Do Not Fix

What attention span actually means, what attention exercises reliably change, what the trials found about transfer, and what to do instead.

By Published Updated 6 min read

Reign Creative LLC makes IQ Test & Brain Training Games, which this article links to, so we have a commercial interest in it. How we write and check articles.

Key takeaways

  • Attention is not one capacity with one span. Sustained attention over minutes, selective attention among distractors and divided attention across two demands are separate problems with separate fixes.
  • An attention exercise reliably improves performance on that exercise. The question worth asking is whether it improves anything you actually care about, and there the evidence is much weaker.
  • A meta-analysis of randomised trials by Cortese and colleagues found that cognitive training improved working-memory performance substantially while its effects on symptoms assessed by blinded raters were small, and that there were no significant effects on reading or arithmetic.
  • Vallesi and colleagues' meta-analysis of sustained-attention tasks shows how much of a score reflects strategy rather than capacity: older adults were slower on go trials but made fewer false alarms, a trade-off rather than a deficit.
  • IQ Test & Brain Training Games, our own app, includes focus games that its listing says challenge attention and distractor resistance, and a reaction time test. Getting better at them is evidence that you got better at them, not that your attention span grew, and the listing describes its test results as estimates rather than professional assessments.
  • The interventions with the best support for staying on a task are structural: shorter sessions, fewer interruptions, and a task specified clearly enough to start.

Attention exercises make you better at attention exercises. That is the finding, and everything else in this article is an elaboration of it. If what you want is to sit with a long document without reaching for your phone, a rapid-detection drill is not the intervention with the best evidence behind it — and being told otherwise is the most common way this category oversells itself.

"Attention span" is at least three different things

Before asking whether it can be trained, it is worth separating what people mean by it, because the label hides several distinct abilities that fail in different ways.

Sustained attention is staying with one undemanding task over an extended period. It is measured with vigilance tasks where targets are rare and the main enemy is monotony.

Selective attention is holding onto a target while competing information is present. It is measured with interference tasks, and it fails when the distractor wins.

Divided attention is tracking two things that both need updating. It is the most fragile of the three and the one most people overestimate in themselves.

A fourth thing gets folded in colloquially and does not belong: the ability to start and stay with a self-directed task over an hour. That is closer to motivation, task structure and environment than to any laboratory attention measure, and it responds to different interventions entirely.

Advice that treats all of these as one dial is advice about nothing specific. The rest of this article keeps them apart.

What an attention exercise reliably changes

One thing: performance on the exercise.

This is not a dismissal. Improving on a trained task is a real effect with a real mechanism — you learn the timing, the layout, the type of target, where errors come from, and how to trade speed against accuracy on this particular task. It is the same near-transfer effect that shows up across the practice literature, and we set the evidence out in do brain training apps work.

What it is not is proof that a general capacity has expanded. The 2014 consensus statement issued jointly by the Stanford Center on Longevity and the Max Planck Institute for Human Development holds that the scientific literature does not support claims that software-based brain games improve general cognitive performance in everyday life or prevent cognitive decline. That statement was signed by dozens of researchers who study exactly this, and it remains the fairest one-sentence summary of where the field sits.

What the well-controlled trials found

Two studies are worth knowing about in detail, because they are the kind of evidence that distinguishes a real effect from an expectation effect.

Thompson and colleagues trained participants on an adaptive working-memory task for 20 sessions — about 40 minutes a day, five days a week, for four weeks — against an active control group doing a different demanding task on the same schedule. Both groups improved substantially and durably on what they had trained. Neither showed transfer to untrained working-memory measures or to fluid intelligence. When the comparison group is also doing something difficult, the extra benefit disappears.

Cortese and colleagues conducted a meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials of cognitive training, published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry. Training improved performance on trained working-memory measures substantially. Effects on symptom ratings shrank when the raters were blinded — from a standardised mean difference of 0.37 on unblinded measures to 0.20 on blinded ones — and on academic outcomes in reading and arithmetic there were no significant effects. Their conclusion was that despite improving working-memory performance, cognitive training had limited effects on symptoms according to blinded assessments.

That study concerns a clinical population and a clinical question, and we cite it only because it is one of the best-controlled tests of whether attention-related training reaches behaviour outside the training. It is not a statement about any app, it is not a recommendation, and nothing in this article is medical advice or a claim about any condition.

A score is partly a strategy

One more finding reframes what an attention number even means. Vallesi and colleagues meta-analysed sustained-attention tasks across twelve studies comparing younger and older adults. Older adults were substantially slower on go trials — but they also produced fewer false alarms on no-go trials, and showed more post-error slowing. The authors read this as a more prudent strategy in the use of attentional resources rather than as an inhibitory deficit.

That is a general lesson about attention scores. Speed and accuracy trade against each other, and two people with identical underlying ability can produce very different numbers by sitting at different points on that trade-off. If your score on a timed drill improves, check whether your accuracy moved in the same direction before concluding anything.

What our app has, and what it does not

IQ Test & Brain Training Games is our own app, built by Reign Creative, and the plainest useful thing we can say here is what its listing actually claims. It includes focus games that the listing says challenge attention and distractor resistance, and a reaction time test that it says measures speed and consistency. The listing describes that result, like its other test results, as an estimate based on app activities, not a professional assessment.

It also has drills that demand attention while asking about something else: rounds with a very brief exposure, rapid-recognition rounds, rounds that require you to hold two attributes of an item at once, and arithmetic sprints under a 30-, 60- or 75-second clock. Those are attention-demanding by construction. Demanding attention and training attention are different claims. The listing files its focus games under brain training; the evidence above supports the narrower reading — you get better at the games you practise — and that is the only claim this article makes for them.

What to change instead

If the real problem is the fourth thing — starting a task and staying with it — the interventions with the best support are structural rather than internal.

  • Shorten the session and define its end. A session with a boundary is easier to begin than an open-ended one, and it is the reason short drills survive a bad week where long ones do not. Our guide to building a daily practice habit covers the mechanics.
  • Remove the interruption rather than resisting it. This is the single biggest lever available, and it is covered properly in our article on the conditions that make concentration possible.
  • Specify the next action. "Revise chapter four" is a project. "Work the six problems on page 81" is a task you can actually start, and a specified task competes much better against a notification than a vague one does.
  • Use retrieval, not rereading. Attention wanders fastest during passive review. Active recall keeps you occupied by construction, the techniques are in memory techniques that actually work, and the reason passive review feels so convincing is set out in judging your own recall.

The wider evidence on capacity and training sits in working memory and training, the rest of this subject is collected in the memory and attention hub and the education and brain training category, and the drills themselves are in IQ Test & Brain Training Games.

The honest position

Practise an attention-demanding drill because it is absorbing, because it gives a short session a clear shape, or because you enjoy watching a number move. Those are good reasons, and they are the reasons this article offers.

Do not practise one expecting it to repair your relationship with long-form reading, and treat any product that promises that as having gone past what the evidence allows. Practice, entertainment, educational activity and standardised assessment are four different things. Attention exercises are comfortably in the first three and nowhere near the fourth.

Good to know

Frequently asked questions

Do attention span exercises work?
They work on themselves. Practising a vigilance or rapid-detection task reliably improves your performance on that task, and that improvement is genuine. What the evidence does not support is the further step most people want — that the gain shows up when you sit down with a long document or a difficult conversation. Transfer to dissimilar activities is weak and contested across this whole literature.
What does attention span actually mean?
It is a loose popular term covering several distinct abilities. Sustained attention is staying with one undemanding task over minutes. Selective attention is holding a target while distractors compete. Divided attention is tracking two things at once. They are measured differently and they fail differently, so advice that treats them as a single dial is usually advice about nothing in particular.
Does a memory or maths app train attention?
Ours is not only a memory and maths app: IQ Test & Brain Training Games includes focus games that its listing says challenge attention and distractor resistance, plus a reaction time test. What the evidence supports is narrower than the word training suggests — practising those games reliably improves performance on those games, while effects beyond the trained task are weak and contested. Its listing describes the reaction time test and other results as estimates based on app activities, not professional assessments.
What should I do instead if I cannot focus?
Change the conditions before changing yourself. Shorter defined sessions, a specific next action rather than a vague one, and fewer interruptions have better support than any exercise. Persistent difficulty with attention that affects work, study or daily life is worth discussing with a qualified professional; nothing here is medical advice and no app is a substitute for that conversation.

Sources

  1. Cognitive Training for Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder: Meta-Analysis of Clinical and Neuropsychological Outcomes From Randomized Controlled Trials (opens in a new tab)Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, via PubMed Central (PMC4382075) — accessed
  2. Age differences in sustained attention tasks: A meta-analysis (opens in a new tab)Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, via PubMed Central (PMC8642381) — accessed
  3. Failure of Working Memory Training to Enhance Cognition or Intelligence (opens in a new tab)PLoS One, via PubMed Central (PMC3661602) — accessed
  4. A Consensus on the Brain Training Industry from the Scientific Community (opens in a new tab)Stanford Center on Longevity and Max Planck Institute for Human Development — accessed

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