I received a Kindle for my birthday, and enjoying “light reading,” in
addition to the dense science I read for work, I immediately loaded it
with mysteries by my favorite authors. But I soon found that I had
difficulty recalling the names of characters from chapter to chapter. At
first, I attributed the lapses to a scary reality of getting older —
but then I discovered that I didn’t have this problem when I read
paperbacks.
When I discussed my quirky recall with friends and colleagues, I
found out I wasn’t the only one who suffered from “e-book moments.”
Online, I
discovered
that Google’s Larry Page himself had concerns about research showing
that on-screen reading is measurably slower than reading on paper.
This seems like a particularly troubling trend for academia, where
digital books are slowly overtaking the heavy tomes I used to lug
around. On many levels, e-books seem like better alternatives to
textbooks — they can be easily updated and many formats allow readers to
interact with the material more, with quizzes, video, audio and other
multimedia to reinforce lessons. But some studies suggest that there may
be significant advantages in printed books if your goal is to remember
what you read long-term.
VIDEO: Trippy Video: Inside the World Series of Memorization
Kate Garland, a lecturer in psychology at the University of Leicester
in England, is one of the few scientists who has studied this question
and reviewed the data. She found that when the exact same material is
presented in both media, there is no measurable difference in student
performance.
However, there are some subtle distinctions that favor print, which
may matter in the long run. In one study involving psychology students,
the medium did seem to matter. “We bombarded poor psychology students
with economics that they didn’t know,” she says. Two differences
emerged. First, more repetition was required with computer reading to
impart the same information.
Second, the book readers seemed to digest the material more fully.
Garland explains that when you recall something, you either “know” it
and it just “comes to you” — without necessarily consciously recalling
the context in which you learned it — or you “remember” it by cuing
yourself about that context and then arriving at the answer. “Knowing”
is better because you can recall the important facts faster and
seemingly effortlessly.
“What we found was that people on paper started to ‘know’ the
material more quickly over the passage of time,” says Garland. “It took
longer and [required] more repeated testing to get into that knowing
state [with the computer reading, but] eventually the people who did it
on the computer caught up with the people who [were reading] on paper.”
Context and landmarks may actually be important to going from
“remembering” to “knowing.” The more associations a particular memory
can trigger, the more easily it tends to be recalled. Consequently,
seemingly irrelevant factors like remembering whether you read something
at the top or the bottom of page — or whether it was on the right or
left hand side of a two-page spread or near a graphic — can help cement
material in mind.
MORE: Why Remembering Names Is Hard — and What to Do About It
This seems irrelevant at first, but spatial context may be
particularly important because evolution may have shaped the mind to
easily recall location cues so we can find our way around. That’s why
great memorizers since antiquity have used a trick called the “
method of loci”
to associate facts they want to remember with places in spaces they
already know, like rooms in their childhood home. They then visualize
themselves wandering sequentially through the rooms, recalling the items
as they go.
As neuroscientist Mark Changizi put it in a
blog post:
In nature, information comes with a physical address (and
often a temporal one), and one can navigate to and from the address.
Those raspberry patches we found last year are over the hill and through
the woods — and they are still over the hill and through the woods.
And up until the rise of the web, the mechanisms for information
storage were largely spatial and could be navigated, thereby tapping
into our innate navigation capabilities. Our libraries and books — the
real ones, not today’s electronic variety — were supremely navigable.
E-books, however, provide fewer spatial landmarks than print,
especially pared-down versions like the early Kindles, which simply
scroll through text and don’t even show page numbers, just the
percentage already read. In a sense, the page is infinite and limitless,
which can be dizzying. Printed books on the other hand, give us a
physical reference point, and part of our recall includes how far along
in the book we are, something that’s more challenging to assess on an
e-book.
Jakob Nielsen, a Web “usability” expert and principal of the Nielsen
Norman Group, believes e-reading does lead to a different type of
recall. “I really do think we remember less” from e-books, he says.
“This is not something I have formally measured, but just based on both
studies we’ve done looking at reading behavior on tablets and books and
reading from regular computers.”
He says that studies show that smaller screens also make material
less memorable. “The bigger the screen, the more people can remember and
the smaller, the less they can remember,” he says. “The most dramatic
example is reading from mobile phones. [You] lose almost all context.”
Searching by typing or scrolling back is also more distracting than
simply turning back pages to return to an important point, he
notes. “Human short-term memory is extremely volatile and weak,” says
Nielsen. “That’s why there’s a huge benefit from being able to glance
[across a page or two] and see [everything] simultaneously. Even though
the eye can only see one thing at a time, it moves so fast that for all
practical purposes, it can see [the pages] and can interrelate the
material and understand it more.”
Flipping through pages is also less mentally taxing. “The more you
have to expend your minimal brain power to divert it into these other
tasks [like search, the less it is] available for learning.”
This doesn’t mean that there isn’t a place for e-text books or
computerized courseware, however. Neither Nielsen nor Garland is opposed
to using new media for teaching. In fact, both believe that there are
many situations in which they can offer real advantages. However,
different media have different strengths — and it may be that physical
books are best when you want to study complex ideas and concepts that
you wish to integrate deeply into your memory. More studies will likely
show what material is best suited for learning in a digital format, and
what type of lessons best remain in traditional textbooks.
But someone — perhaps the publishing industry? — is going to have to take the initiative and fund them.
