4.2 Conclusions
Undergraduate students spend an average of 6.5
hours on their daily activities, which most of the time
are spent on reading (St Clair-Thompson, Graham,
Marsham 2018). Since the reading activity is heavily
emphasized in undergraduate students’ academic
life, interruption on VSTM, the reading-related
memory can imply negative outcome of reading
activities.
Prior research has shown VSTM disruption by
selective attentional disruption (Makovsik, Jiang
2007). Makovski et al. performed an experiment to
prove that if attention is shifted from a distributed
mode to a focused mode, the VSTM performance
increased (Makovsik, Jiang 2007). This previous
research showed a relationship between VSTM and
attention. When the participants are viewing short
videos, the short videos are considered sensory
inputs, and according to the Atkinson-Shiffrin
’s
Modal Model of memory, the visual input are stored
in sensory memory and later filtered by attention to
store in the VSTM. In the case where experimental
groups are viewing short videos, if a further
experiment can be performed to verified that the
participant’s attention is in a disrupted state, then it
would be possible to verify the result by Makovski et
al.
From an application perspective, this study has
provided a result showing that the popular activity of
short video viewing has an impact on VSTM, which
is an academic-activity-related form of memory. The
result can provide reference for short video
application users, especially undergraduate students,
parents, universities, and the short video application
companies.
4.3 Limitations and Future Directions
The sample size of this study is limited and there is
an unequal distribution of gender. The experiment
was designed to run online, but due to time and
device limit, and the social gathering restrictions, the
experiment was run in an alternative form and run
online using zoom and reaction time was recorded
using verbal response from participants. Also, there
is an ambiguous requirement of short videos
viewing. Some participants from the experimental
group are observed scrolling the short videos
consistently, while others finish watching each video
to the end.
As a result, more data gathering is needed in the
subsequent stages of research, and more analysis can
be done once data size is sufficient. Since short
videos is a brand-new form of media, study how the
content and structure of short videos influences
VSTM performance is also considered a next step.
Possible neuroscientific studies like EEG and fMRI
can be combined with behavioural test to reveal more
biological evidence to support the gathered data.
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