Intense Short-Video-Based Social Media Use reduces the P300 Event-Related Potential Component in a Visual Oddball Experiment: A Sign for Reduced Attention

The birth and following growth of social media platforms has influenced a lot. In addition to beneficial features, it has long-been noticed that heavy consumption of social media can have negative effects beyond a simple lack of time for other things. Of particular interest is the idea that consuming short videos lasting only fractions of a minute and watched one after another can lead to deficits in concentration and attention. Completing the existing literature that already reports evidence for attention deficits related to heavy social media use, the present study aims to contribute to this acute topic by adding neurophysiological data to it. In particular, this study made use of a well-known experimental paradigm, which is able to detect attention-related changes on a neurophysiological level. The so-called oddball paradigm was applied and the hypothesis that heavy social media users mainly consuming short videos show a reduced P300 event-related potential (ERP) component was tested, which has been found to reflect attention-related brain functions. For this, we invited twenty-nine participants and designed a visual oddball experiment including a white circle on black background as the low-frequency target stimulus and a white triangle on black background as the high-frequency non-target stimulus. On the basis of their self-reported short-video-based social media usage habits, all participants were grouped into heavy (more than 4 h daily usage) and regular (below 3 h daily usage) users, and finally data from 14 heavy and 15 regular users were further analyzed. It was found that only regular users show a clear P300 ERP component, while this particular brain potential amplitude reflecting attentional processes was significantly reduced in heavy users. This result provides empirical brain imaging evidence that heavy short-video-based social media use indeed affects attentional brain processes in a negative way.