Endless Swipes and Recommendations: The Impact of Short-Form Video Platforms on Context-Switching and Children’s Working Memory

Short-form video (SFV) platforms are increasingly popular, yet the rapid context switching and their potential effects on children’s cognitive functions are not well understood. In this work, we conducted a between-subjects experiment (N = 180) to examine how YouTube Shorts affects young children’s short-term memory (STM) and working memory (WM), measured using the forward and backward digit span tasks. The study focused on two core platform features of SFV: the easy-to-use swipe interface and the recommendation system. Using a 2 × 2 factorial design, we compared four SFV group conditions that varied by interaction mode and content source, complemented by two long-form video baseline conditions (one with constant context switching and one without). Our results show that the feature combinations and the baseline comparisons were not associated with changes in STM or WM. However, swipe interaction increased video switching, while recommendation-based content increased category switching. The higher combined levels of video and category switching across participants were associated with marginal effects on working memory performance, while STM remained unaffected.