Friday, June 24, 2016

Print vs digital reading study

There's new reason to believe so-called "digital natives" really do think differently in response to technology: It may be "priming" them to think more concretely and remember details rather than the big picture when they work on a screen. Among young adults who regularly use smartphones and tablets, just reading a story or performing a task on a screen instead of on paper led to greater focus on concrete details, but less ability to infer meaning or quickly get the gist of a problem, found a series of experiments. Using a digital format can develop a "mental 'habit' of triggering a more detail-focused mindset, one that prioritizes processing local, immediate information rather than considering more abstract, decontextualized interpretations of information. 
Flanagan, M., & Kaufman, G. (2016). High-Low Split: Divergent Cognitive Construal Levels Triggered by Digital and Non-digital PlatformsCHI '16: Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

No comments: