The Relationship of Media Multitasking and Social Media Use with Attention and Executive Functions in Adults: A Scoping Review

ABSTRACT Concern that habitual media multitasking and social media use are eroding adult cognition has become widespread, yet the empirical literature underlying that concern is notably mixed. This scoping review, conducted in accordance with the PRISMA-ScR framework and JBI methodology, maps the available evidence on how media multitasking and social media use relate to attention and executive functions in adults, and asks whether the apparent inconsistency of the literature conceals an interpretable structure. A systematic search of Scopus and PubMed, supplemented by hand searching, yielded 1,247 records, of which 28 empirical studies met the inclusion criteria after screening in Rayyan. Studies were synthesized narratively around four thematic clusters: media multitasking and sustained attention, media multitasking and core executive functions, social media use and executive functions, and neurobiological correlates. Three findings organize the results. First, the evidence points to a domain-specific pattern: media multitasking was associated with sustained attention difficulty with reasonable consistency, but showed little reliable association with core executive functions, a pattern visible both across studies and within a single experiment. Second, the direction of findings depended heavily on measurement: associations observed in self-report measures were not consistently reproduced in objective performance tasks, pointing to shared method variance as a partial explanation for the field's apparent consensus. Third, associations between social media use and executive difficulty emerged mainly when engagement was operationalized as problematic use rather than general frequency. Evaluated against the depletion, scattered attention, and trained attention hypotheses, no single account explained the full pattern; the evidence was more consistent with a domain-specific interpretation in which media multitasking relates to sustained attention while largely sparing executive control. These findings suggest that the popular narrative of broad cognitive erosion overstates the case, Because the evidence base draws heavily on young adult and university samples, these conclusions apply most securely to that population rather than to the adult lifespan as a whole, and future research should prioritize longitudinal designs, objective measurement, more diverse samples, and the distinction between ordinary and problematic use. Keywords: media multitasking, social media use, sustained attention, executive functions, problematic social media use, scoping review, attention