What is the attention span of a 5 month old baby?

What the evidence says

There isn't an official chart that says exactly how many minutes a 5-month-old should be able to pay attention for. Attention in babies this age is usually measured in seconds, not minutes, because researchers watch how long a baby looks at a face, toy, or sound before looking away.

Scientists who study this say that a baby's ability to control where they look and how long they stay focused grows a lot between 3 and 6 months old. By about 6 months, the basic brain systems for shifting and holding attention are fairly well set up, though attention keeps improving for years after that.

At 5 months, babies are also starting to follow what a caregiver is looking at, which is called joint attention. This is an early building block for language and learning, even though the baby's focus on any one thing is still brief.

For comparison, one parenting resource notes that even by 8 months, babies typically spend only two to three minutes on a single toy before moving to something new, and it isn't until around 12 months that some babies can stay with a toy for up to 15 minutes. A 5-month-old's attention will generally be shorter than that.

Short attention span at this age is completely normal. Babies learn best in small bursts of shared play, like looking at a book or toy together for a minute or two, rather than long stretches of focused activity.