It’s interesting that this started showing up in the 2010s, during the rise of smartphone use. 
Though there has been a demonstrably steep decline in cognitive skills since the COVID-19 pandemic due to the educational disruption it presented, these trends have been in evidence since at least the mid-2010s, suggesting that whatever is going on runs much deeper and has lasted far longer than the pandemic.
Obviously, there’s no single answer as to why people seem to be struggling with cognitive skills, but one key indicator is the sharp decline in reading and the world’s changing relationship to the way we consume information and media. In 2022, for example, the National Endowment for the Arts found that just 37.6 percent of Americans said they’d read a novel or short story in the year prior — a share down from 41.5 percent in 2017 and 45.2 percent in 2012.