Serendipity35

Before you start this post, concentrate on trying to identify the main point from cognitive research while you are reading.

"Do Screens Make Us Stupider?" asks Julie Sedivy in a Discover article subtitled "Time for a Rethink of Reading."

She teaches at a university and the company that just published her textbook tells her that 90 percent of students prefer the paper version to the e-book. Why?

Is it true that information is more securely fixed in people’s minds when they read it from paper?  Does the visual fatigue of navigating text onscreen interfere with the processing of information? Have we developed superficial reading habits while online or onscreen - and might it be even shallower on a phone screen as compared to a traditional computer monitor?

Sedivy gets into a bit of the cognitive research on reading, which is inconclusive. The way we read varies widely in different settings, with text acting as a prompt for very different kinds of mental pursuits.

The same material can trigger very different thoughts depending on the reader's cognitive goals. Telling a reader to focus on imagery seems to lead to better retention of the material.

But those goals can also be unintentionally triggered.  Researchers asked people to unscramble sentences that contained words like evaluate, judgment, and personality before reading and just seeing those seemed to have the same effect as asking them explicitly to judge character in their reading.

Does simply encountering words on a screen rather than a paper page now create an unintentional "goal" in our mind?

Researchers keep playing with the experience. Given a product review in a harder-to-read font, readers more carefully evaluated the merits of the arguments. Did they turn on their focu because the information felt harder to process.

Should I write my posts in harder-to-read fonts and set up reading goals before each post?

One takeaway from the research is the idea that the presentation of text plays an important part in what a reader does cognitively while reading and also what the reader retains after the reading experience.

Did the goal/prompt at the start of this post change your reading or retention at all?

More at discovermagazine.com