Balancing Speed and Experience: The Cognitive and Affective Impacts of Playback Acceleration in Digital Media Consumption

Rich Yueh^*Jonathan LimYe LiRasam Dorri

• University of California Riverside School of Business, Riverside, United States

Playback speed controls have become a ubiquitous feature of digital media platforms, offering users the ability to accelerate content for efficiency and personalization. While these tools promise time savings, their effects on user experience remain incompletely understood. This research examined how playback speed influences cognitive engagement, affective experience (satisfaction, discomfort, perceived distortions), speaker perceptions, and behavioral intentions across three experiments using both procedural and conceptual video content. Overall, we found that faster playback speeds consistently increased perceived distortions and modestly reduced satisfaction, with more limited and context-dependent effects on cognitive engagement, discomfort, and speaker favorability. Importantly, motivational cues such as quiz expectations sometimes enhanced engagement at faster speeds, particularly among student viewers accustomed to academic testing environments. However, playback speed had little impact on viewers’ intentions to reengage with the content. These findings highlight playback speed as a meaningful design variable with complex effects shaped by user expectations, content type, and audience characteristics, underscoring the need for more thoughtful integration of speed controls in media and educational platforms.