Want to Remember Less? Use an E-Reader
A new study comparing e-reader users to readers of printed books reveals that the former are much worse at recalling when events occurred in a story. As reported in The Guardian, 50 readers participated in a study and were tasked with reading the same 28-page short story by Elizabeth George. Half read the story on a Kindle and half read a paperback. The readers were then tested on the objects, characters and settings from the story.
"The Kindle readers performed significantly worse on the plot reconstruction measure, i.e., when they were asked to place 14 events in the correct order," notes Anne Mangen of Norway's Stavanger University. She was a lead researcher on the study and chairs a European research network that studies the effects of digital text on reading.
Mangen added that it is important to provide publishers with these statistics so that they will know which devices should be used for what kind of content.
The research concluded that the "the haptic and tactile feedback of a Kindle does not provide the same support for mental reconstruction of a story as a print pocket book does."