Do E-Books Make It Harder to Remember What You Just Read?

[DaleDe]

Here is an article in Time magazine on the topic: http://healthland.time.com/2012/03/1...-impair-memory

What do you think?

Dale

[Graham]

No. I suspect it is age.

Graham

[jgaiser]

Not age necessarily. I'm 66 and I don't have any more trouble with ebooks than paper.

[eschwartz]

I most assuredly do not have that problem. I agree it's probably age.

I did notice they said people remember things they read based on "spatial landmarks" and I must say I am not aware of ever using such a method even subconsciously. But I can remember some very obscure details about books.

And if I want to find something I read before, and could easily flip through the pages because I know exactly where it was -- maybe it was 2 pages ago or something -- I can flip through my Kindle just as easily. THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE between flipping through a book and a Kindle, except the size of the page. If I end up searching, it it in a situation where it would take me >15min. to find it manually...

[mnha]

I suspect the research is flawed.

They've bombarded psychology students with economics. Given my overall experiences with human scientists, I'd be hard pressed to exclude technophobia as a serious source of bias. Most students of those sciences I've met were of the "print your email, underline important parts, scribble on the margin and sort the whole mess into neat folders with colour-coded tabs" variety. That approach doesn't work well with ereaders/tablets.

Being reduced to learning strategies you're not used to might well explain lagging behind your peers. I suspect if that experiment was repeated among computer scientist students, you'd get significantly different results. Not the kind of study I'd put a lot of faith in.

Anecdotal "evidence" about "ebook moments" is plain useless. I've had plenty of these moments with the dead tree editions, myself.

Nielsen's argument about context lost has some merit, though.

[Catlady]

It is not as easy to flip back screens as it is to flip back pages. It is not as easy to find something that your mind remembers was near the bottom of the page when there's no page.

The search function only works if you remember the specific wording rather than the idea.

I am bemused by the way any criticism of e-reading, however slight, seems always to be met here with disbelief and disdain.

[Atunah]

Its the opposite for me. I finally can read the font properly without squinting and getting distracted from trying to read towards the spine. Or trying to pry open a new paperback with 2 hands, which feels like a workout sometimes.

Now I just read and get lost in the story. So I don't skip or get distracted. These issues of mine with paper had only crept up in the last some years. Before that with just paper, I remembered everything I read the same I do now, as far as I can tell. Probably still as bad with names as I was before. Real and fiction.

I only read fiction.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by Catlady

It is not as easy to flip back screens as it is to flip back pages. It is not as easy to find something that your mind remembers was near the bottom of the page when there's no page.

The search function only works if you remember the specific wording rather than the idea.

I am bemused by the way any criticism of e-reading, however slight, seems always to be met here with disbelief and disdain.

I guess it kind of depends. Personally, I have no idea in any book I have EVER read where on the page something was. 16 years of reading and only 2.5 years with an ereader.

I would have to disagree about turning pages -- I can't tell the difference between the usability either way.

Search does not require specific wording, only keywords based on what's been going on in that scene. I never have a problem with working it out, although maybe other paople are different. I wouldn't just discard the idea though.

[Tarana]

I do think ereading reduces the mnemonic aids in memory. However, let's consider the fact that it is an unfair test to compare psychology students given economics textbooks. I don't know about you, but most of the psychology students that I knew in college did poorly in economics with paper textbooks. In other words, they already suck at the subject given the previous technology (textbooks).

I have no idea in any book I have EVER read where on the page something was

This is completely dependent on how you learn. I know I used this method of remembering in chemistry and physics classes, but not in classes where it was solid text like English Lit. In fact, I still use that memory by location to remember how to set up converting to different measurements now that I almost never need to use it.

[elcreative]

Originally Posted by Catlady

It is not as easy to flip back screens as it is to flip back pages. It is not as easy to find something that your mind remembers was near the bottom of the page when there's no page.

The search function only works if you remember the specific wording rather than the idea.

I am bemused by the way any criticism of e-reading, however slight, seems always to be met here with disbelief and disdain.

Why isn't it as easy - all my ereaders and tablet apps (apart from the Kindle app) have page numbers that stay the same so if it was at the bottom of a page then it's still at the bottom of a page... and search only requires remembering a word in the idea - I agree if you can't even remember a word then search is useless but then, even in a paper book, you have to recall something to page back and find earlier material.

Probably the defence of ereading tends to be because most people, on here, are a elf-selecting, strongly pro-ereading group by the nature of the forum - mobile read...

[latepaul]

I love my ereaders and whilst I will read paper I prefer ebooks. However I do identify a little bit with this. I'm honestly not sure whether my decrease in recall is just age-related and co-incidental with my use of ebooks or if there's a link. I do think that the lack of some of the context doesn't help. I'm definitely someone who remembers which part of a page I read something on.

Search is great but it does depend on remembering the right keywords. If I'm reading a book about a magical ring and I want to find the name of the character who first had it that may be a tough one. If I search for "ring" I'll got lots of hits. I'll also get phrases like "that has the ring of truth about it" or even, depending on the reader's software things like "wondering" etc. Now if I know I'm looking for a particular scene that was on the bottom left hand page at the start of a new paragraph...

Another thing I find interesting is that the thing about screen size. I've found I do prefer reading on my PC monitor or TV screen (using an attached Android device) a lot of the time. So I wonder if there's something in that.

All that said, I do still love my devices

[latepaul]

Originally Posted by elcreative

Why isn't it as easy - all my ereaders and tablet apps (apart from the Kindle app) have page numbers that stay the same so if it was at the bottom of a page then it's still at the bottom of a page...

But even if the page numbers remain the same you won't necessarily remember the page number. And if you're holding a physical book you're more likely to remember roughly how far through you were from the thickness of the pages read so far, than you are to remember that the page number was in the 60s-90s if you only ever glance at the page numbers anyway.

At least that'd be true for me.

[crich70]

Originally Posted by Catlady

It is not as easy to flip back screens as it is to flip back pages. It is not as easy to find something that your mind remembers was near the bottom of the page when there's no page.

The search function only works if you remember the specific wording rather than the idea.

I am bemused by the way any criticism of e-reading, however slight, seems always to be met here with disbelief and disdain.

It can be just as hard to remember exactly where something is in a paper book as it is in an ebook (IMO). We think that it's easier to work with paper pages because we've had some 400 + years of using that media. No doubt there were some back when books went from scrolls to manuscript (early books) who felt that scrolls were easier to access than the early books. It's all a matter of point of view I think.

[Catlady]

Originally Posted by latepaul

But even if the page numbers remain the same you won't necessarily remember the page number. And if you're holding a physical book you're more likely to remember roughly how far through you were from the thickness of the pages read so far, than you are to remember that the page number was in the 60s-90s if you only ever glance at the page numbers anyway.

At least that'd be true for me.

Yes, this is what I mean--I'll have a sense that something I'm looking for was a third of the way back in the middle of the page. I don't know the page number, unless maybe it's the page I began on that day.

I can remember taking tests in college and visualizing the textbook page to try to retrieve some bit of information in my memory banks. If I needed to do that with an e-book, I don't know that I could--there's nothing to help differentiate one screen from another so that I'd be able to access the memory.

[Catlady]

Originally Posted by crich70

It can be just as hard to remember exactly where something is in a paper book as it is in an ebook (IMO). We think that it's easier to work with paper pages because we've had some 400 + years of using that media. No doubt there were some back when books went from scrolls to manuscript (early books) who felt that scrolls were easier to access than the early books. It's all a matter of point of view I think.

Fine, I'm willing to accept that in a few hundred years, our memories will adapt. But for now, it seems quite reasonable that studies would find that generally people remember info on paper more easily.