Challenging Digital Attention Economy: Cognitive Perspectives on Accessible Climate Communication

In the contemporary digital landscape, users are inundated with an overwhelming volume of information. Human attention serves as the gateway to cognition, emotion, and behavior, yet it remains a limited resource often challenged with overload. This attention economy presents significant hurdles for climate change communication. Despite a scientific consensus regarding anthropogenic climate change, digital media platforms frequently struggle to capture or maintain public engagement when conveying the complexity of climate science as well as urgency and nuance of desired solutions associated with the climate crisis.

Prioritizing the cognitive accessibility of climate information offers a promising strategy to combat the complexity of climate issues combined with information clutter generated by digital platforms. These environments, characterized by endless scrolling and fragmented formats, typically rely on bottom-up attentional capture through immediate emotional triggers and rewards. By enhancing accessibility, we can dismantle barriers for all users, thereby fostering better comprehension and more durable cognitive involvement. Meaningful shifts in pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors are most achievable when sustained focal attention is secured and the effort required for top-down cognitive processing is reduced.

To address the disconnect between the scientific gravity of climate issues and the competitive nature of the modern attention economy, it is essential to utilize understanding of core cognitive processes governing user interaction with digital climate content. This Research Topic seeks to integrate perspectives from cognitive psychology, environmental psychology, media and communication accessibility studies to analyze the attentional dynamics of climate messaging. Our objective is to identify the factors that attract and sustain cognitive engagement, as well as to determine how digital formats and framing influence information processing and subsequent environmental action.

We seek for investigations of specific mechanisms of information processing in high-distraction environments, examining how cognitive load affects the translation of climate knowledge into pro-environmental behavior.

The Research Topic will also complement with reflection on a link between media accessibility and environmental sustainability, such as examining AI and digital media's carbon footprint and its mitigation strategies. By bridging the gap between cognitive science and environmental communication, we invite contributions on evidence-based strategies that prioritize both user engagement and ecological responsibility.

We invite scholarly submissions that examine the nexus between digital media users’ attentional and cognitive processes, the efficacy of digital climate communication, and information accessibility for neurodivergent populations. We particularly seek for interdisciplinary theoretical and empirical approaches as well as implementation of innovative methodological paradigms, including eye-tracking, psychophysiology, neuroimaging, or the analysis of large-scale digital behavioral datasets.

Specific themes of interest include, but are not limited to:

- Attentional Capture and Framing: Emotional valences and framing impacts on engagement.
- Information Avoidance and Doomscrolling: Mechanisms of news avoidance versus compulsive consumption.
- Cognitive Load and Media Format: Structural impacts on memory and attention.
- Methodological Innovations: Objective quantification of affective responses.
- From Attention to Action: Translating engagement into pro-environmental behaviors.
- Sustainable AI for Neurodiversity: Inclusive, cognitive-sustainable AI tools and "Green AI" applications.

We accept Original Research, Brief Research Reports, Reviews, Mini-Reviews, Perspectives, and Position Papers.