[Sil_liS]

Originally Posted by Lbooker

Only one article ? Do you seriously believe your effort is worth anything ? Nobody here has been capable of finding several articles, and then comparing and evaluating them. Typical of 99.99 % of people on internet forums. Serious intellectuals who write or have written a thesis know how to work.
kennyc sounded very happy about this lonely article and quoted the conclusion...typical of lazy, biased readers.
I can read, so I am going to demonstrate to all of you how it is done properly.
First, you have to examine who did and who funded this research. This research was partly funded by the marketing branch of the German book industry, so if you know anything about the corruption and position of weakness of the majority of scientists in relation to funding, you immediately understand you have to research the strategic goals of this industry. Like everywhere else, they are seeing diminishing sales of paper books and bet the future of their business on electronic versions of books. Better still, the introduction of this paper states the goal, which is to assuage the fears of the too conservative German readers who are moving too slowly away from paper books compared to their American counterparts, negatively influenced by articles published in the German press which dared attack screen technologies and their impact on child development. Another stated goal is specifically to contradict a large-scale survey of students and faculty at University College London in which students subjectively judged the ease of reading of e-books to be considerably worse than for conventional printed books.
The first scientific data they present is by far the most revealing : it shows that the reading comprehension error rate is the lowest for the text read on paper ! It is even clearer for the largest and sociologically most coherent group : the students. But here you can see that the devil is in the details : the graphic goes up to 100% even though there is no data above 35%, thus visually crushing the differences. Among students, if you look precisely, you reach a major conclusion: the error rate is between one third and one half higher for texts read on tablets and e-ink than for texts read on paper ! But the researchers under the monetary influence of the modernizing German book industry magically fail to state this. They dismiss this fundamental finding under a fallacious statistical pretext.
Then, after dismissing subjective preferences for paper, they pretend to scientifically fool you with loads of EGG research they do not objectively, scientifically know what to make of, filling their paper with lots of guesses. And why theta, but neither alpha nor beta waves ? Marshall McLuhan and Herbert Krugman knew what they would reveal when reading on a back-lit tablet.
In the end those pathetic researchers under influence claim that they showed something new about the eyes of old readers preferring high contrast, and do not hesitate to boldly incriminate readers based on their very subjectively chosen EGG waves and wild guesses : "This suggests that the overwhelming public opinion that digital reading media, though convenient, reduce the pleasure of reading is a cultural rather than a cognitive phenomenon."
Finally, let us note that this research was not published in a prestigious science journal at all. No wonder. I wonder if the marketing branch of the German book industry is displeased by that, or just cared about one thing : how much the popular press would cover this research : not at all in Germany, it seems. Too bad ! Only a few English language newspapers quoted that old people preferred high contrast. What a waste of money...and paper !

1. I see that it upsets you that I've linked to just one article, but you linked to zero articles.

2. In regards to funding:
a) The research was only partially funded by the marketing branch of the German book industry, and I'm not sure why you would assume that the other groups funding the research would agree to be linked to corrupt results.
b) The publishing industry would prefer people to stay with paper books because they have better control of distribution channels for paper books.

3.They didn't set out to contradict the large-scale survey of students and faculty at University College London, they set out to see how the the subjective impressions correlate with objective measurements.

4. You are complaining about the reading comprehension error rate graph. What you have ignored in your complaint is the error bar on the data. The differences between the results for the three mediums are within the standard mean deviation for the data, which is why they are interpreted as being the same. This is also why the graph scale is larger than the data sets.

5. It's not EGG, it's EEG (ElectroEncephaloGram).

6. "And why theta, but neither alpha nor beta waves?"
The alpha waves were used as reference for each participant.

7. I don't know how you define "prestigious science journal", but it has the respect of Nature:

The open-access movement has spawned many successful, well-respected operations. PLOS ONE, for example, which charges a fee of US$1,350 for authors in middle- and high-income countries, has seen the number of articles it publishes leap from 138 in 2006 to 23,464 last year, making it the world's largest scientific journal.