Interesting article:
Do E-Books Make It Harder to Remember What You Just Read? Conclusion? Maybe and maybe not. How decisive!
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.
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