Content Depth Matters in Short-Video Recommendation: Rethinking the Attention Economy

Driven by the attention economy, short-video Recommender Systems (RSs) are primarily optimized to maximize user engagement by promoting videos that capture attention within seconds. These systems inherently favor shallow-content videos that are effective at attracting immediate attention. However, growing evidence suggests that prolonged exposure to such content may negatively affect users' cognitive engagement and mental well-being, raising concerns about the long-term societal impact of the short-video platform. To tackle this challenge, this paper introduces a new metric, the \textbf{Content Depth Score (CDS)}, to quantify the content depth of short videos. CDS measures the extent to which a video is expected to stimulate higher-order cognitive processes, using a seven-level scale grounded in established theories of cognitive psychology and learning. As an initial step toward this vision, we present \textbf{SCOPE-Bench}, the first benchmark for content-depth evaluation in short-video recommendation. Built upon a large-scale open-source short-video dataset, SCOPE-Bench provides CDS annotations for 150K videos, enabling systematic evaluation of RSs from a cognitive-content perspective. Leveraging SCOPE-Bench, we evaluate 13 representative RSs and reveal a consistent preference for shallow-content videos. Moreover, we find that these algorithms recommending cognitively deep content are only marginally better than random selection, highlighting a previously overlooked limitation of existing recommendation objectives. Our code and datasets are available at https://liweidengdavid.github.io/SCOPE-Bench/.

Measuring Cognitive Engagement in Collaborative Discourse with an Extended ICAP Framework: Comparing Human Annotation, In-Context Learning, and Reflective LLM Agents

Collaboration supports learning and problem-solving, but its effectiveness depends on cognitive engagement during discourse. This study applies an extended 7-point ICAP framework based on the Interactive, Constructive, Active, and Passive modes to characterize variation in cognitive engagement during collaborative dialogue. Engagement was coded by trained human annotators and compared with large language model (LLM)-based labeling approaches, including in-context learning (ICL), zero-shot prompting, and self-reflective agents. Interrater reliability among human annotators was robust across framework refinement stages (kappa = 0.906-0.998), higher than the moderate agreement observed for ICL-based annotation (kappa = 0.541-0.609). The human-refined framework improved agreement among human annotators (Delta kappa = 0.10), but produced only modest gains for ICL-based LLMs (Delta kappa less than 0.04). Agent-refined frameworks improved cross-model agreement but remained below the human-refined framework. These findings highlight the promise of agent-based approaches and the importance of continued interaction between theory-guided human annotation and LLM-based methods in future work.