The Influence of the Attention Decay in an Information Spreading Model

Some work in information spreading show that the attention plays an important role in explaining human behaviors and the attention decay exists in the process of information spreading. However, few researchers take the attention decay into consideration when studying the spreading dynamics of information. In this paper, we propose a susceptible-received-accepted-immune (SRAI) information spreading model to explore the attention decay's effect on the spread dynamics of information, integrating the memory, the social reinforcement and the attention decay. We simulate the model in different complex networks and verify the impacts of the attention decay on the information spreading process. Particularly, simulation results show that in some situations, the effect of the attention decay will decrease with the increasement of the network's randomness. Our work can provide insights to the understanding of the role of the attention decay in information spreading.