Quote:
Originally Posted by Sil_liS
For comprehension there are many things to consider: font size, paragraph size, line spacing, line length, etc. If you were reading a document meant for printing, chances are that it was not optimized for on-screen comprehension. There are fonts that were specifically designed for this purpose. The more your reader imitates paper, the easier it will be to read on it (and remember) something that was designed for paper.
Computer screens are landscape.
Books are portrait.
Scientific articles and text books are portrait and have columns.
With a hand held device and the right software you should be able to optimize a text for comprehension if you take under consideration the type of screen.
I'm assuming that the LCD that you mentioned didn't belong to a hand held device.
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What you say may account for some of my problem, but I'm not convinced it accounts for all of it. You are right in your assumption about the LCD devices; they were computer monitors.
For a while, about ten years ago, I worked on a prototype for reading newspapers on computer monitors. The layout was exactly the same as for a paper newspaper, and there were various methods of zooming in (that was what our company specialized in). Anyway, even with panning and zooming on a fairly large CRT, I eventually noticed that I could read a column of text and then not really remember many of the details when I got to the end of it. My retention was far worse than when I read a physical newspaper. It didn't really matter what legible scale I had zoomed to. I found I had similar problems with reading complicated, technical specifications in PDF format on-screen, as opposed to the printed-out versions. Using LCD monitors later didn't seem to help.
This is speculation, but I get the feeling my brain is working behind the scenes on something, and it is taking resources away from reading comprehension. What it's working on, I have no idea. It might be, as you say, the brain struggling with fonts and layouts, but I used to read some pretty horrendous printed-out fonts and layouts in the pre-LaTeX days of scientific publishing (like in conference proceedings from the late eighties and early nineties), and I never noticed a problem then.
I would be interested to know if anyone has used an MRI to study people's brains while reading under different circumstances.