Brainrot Lecture: The Psychology of Attention in a Digital World w/ Dr. Sarah Shepherd

The dominant narrative suggests that we’re all headed towards brain rot, but the research tells a more interesting story than that. The platforms that most of us spend hours on every day are leveraging decades of research on attention to keep us scrolling. What does that mean for how we learn from and interact with the world? Are our attention spans getting shorter? Can you ‘reset’ your attention? The attention-grabbing strategies used across platforms affect us all—not just your chronically online bestie, but also your roommate that reverted to a flip phone last year. This lecture will tackle some of the big questions many of us are grappling with as we navigate digital environments engineered to capture our attention. We’ll dive into the psychology of attention, and what happens when it encounters systems engineered to capture it. Come for the research, stay for the questions you've probably been asking yourself at 1 am mid-scroll. Join us for a lecture on Brainrot: The Psychology of Attention in a Digital World w/ Dr. Sarah Shepherd About the Lecturer Sarah Shepherd earned her PhD in Psychology at UC Berkeley, where she investigated how attention and learning is shaped by digital media. Shepherd uses eye-tracking experiments and computational modeling across development and species to answer questions about how the structure of information in the environment shapes attention. Shepherd’s research on attention and learning is published in peer-reviewed venues. Several of her lines of work were so influential, they’ve been adopted for use by Common Sense Media as a publicly available tool to help parents discern the quality of content that they show their children. Shepherd was recently awarded funding to develop an open-source AI toolkit for media analysis by the UC Berkeley Economy and Society Technology Cluster. Prestigious academic institutions and technologists alike have invited Shepherd to present her work at the intersection of psychology and technology. Shepherd has given talks at international venues including Max Planck Institutes in Berlin and Leipzig, the Central European University in Budapest and Vienna, Brown University, Bay Area artificial intelligence incubators, Big Brain SF, and is a repeat guest lecturer at UC Berkeley. Event Overview 7:00-7:15 --> arrival & chats 7:15-8:00 --> lecture 8:00-8:30 --> q&a and more chatting — This event is presented alongside our latest exhibition, The Epistemologies of Slop, ​an exhibition exploring how meaning, trust, and culture are produced under conditions of algorithmic excess and generative media. tiat is the intersection of art & technology! ​​​we are gallery for creative technologists to experiment, exhibit, and expand their practice. ⋆౨ৎ˚⟡˖ tiat is 501c3 nonprofit, our EIN is: 39-3448606. follow us on insta!