Jacob Miller
Research Mentor: Cindy Lustig
Mentor Department: Psychology, LSA
Author(s): Jacob Miller, Jim Faulkner, Cindy Lustig
Session: Session 7 (4:00 PM – 4:50 PM)
Presentation Type: Poster 58
Abstract
The consumption of social media content has become increasingly synonymous with the lifestyles of adolescents and young adults (NCSSLE, 2024). However, the type of content consumption (rapid short form content vs. long form content) can have varying effects on cognitive development (Naik et al., 2025). This study seeks to answer the question of what, if any, acute effects on cognition occur due to rapid short form content consumption, like TikTok. We attempted to measure any potential effects by having young adult participants watch TikTok or read a book for 10 minutes before completing a Continuous Temporal Expectancy Task (CTET). Every other run has a distractor video present in the participants visual field that plays short, distracting clips from TV shows or movies. We initially expected to see a difference in CTET scores between the TikTok, book, and control groups, but this has not occurred. One interesting result, however, is that the TikTok group reported significantly higher motivation across the entire task in the post-run attentional survey, when compared to both the book and control conditions. Despite this significant difference in motivation, the average scores of the three groups are extremely similar.
