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In recent years, reading has become an increasingly digital experience. In addition to various subjective impressions about the quality of reading from digital media, e.g. that it is more effortful than reading conventional books, a number of more scientific questions arise at the interface of reading research and book studies. Here, we summarize several new insights on reading effort and reading behavior on digital media. Part one reviews a study in which young and elderly adults read short texts on three different reading devices: a paper page, an e-reader and a tablet computer and answered comprehension questions about them while their eye movements and EEG were recorded. Older adults showed faster mean fixation durations and lower EEG theta band voltage density – known to covary with memory encoding and retrieval – when reading from a tablet computer in comparison to the other devices. Young adults showed comparable fixation durations and theta activity for all three devices. These results can be explained by better text discriminability (higher contrast) of the tablet computer. Older readers may benefit from this enhanced contrast because contrast sensitivity decreases with age. In the second part, we present an explorative study about the influence of font type and typographic alignment (flush left vs. justified) on reading from a tablet computer. Importantly, the eyes do not fall between – increasingly larger – spaces, as expected, but – to the contrary – use these spaces for planning an optimal fixation of the next word. In summary, the perspective presented here provides initial evidence about the fruitfulness of interdisciplinary research between experimental reading, neurocognition and book studies.
In the rapidly changing circumstances of our increasingly digital world, reading is also becoming an increasingly digital experience: electronic books (e-books) are now outselling print books in the United States and the United Kingdom. Nevertheless, many readers still view e-books as less readable than print books. The present study thus used combined EEG and eyetracking measures in order to test whether reading from digital media requires higher cognitive effort than reading conventional books. Young and elderly adults read short texts on three different reading devices: a paper page, an e-reader and a tablet computer and answered comprehension questions about them while their eye movements and EEG were recorded. The results of a debriefing questionnaire replicated previous findings in that participants overwhelmingly chose the paper page over the two electronic devices as their preferred reading medium. Online measures, by contrast, showed shorter mean fixation durations and lower EEG theta band voltage density – known to covary with memory encoding and retrieval – for the older adults when reading from a tablet computer in comparison to the other two devices. Young adults showed comparable fixation durations and theta activity for all three devices. Comprehension accuracy did not differ across the three media for either group. We argue that these results can be explained in terms of the better text discriminability (higher contrast) produced by the backlit display of the tablet computer. Contrast sensitivity decreases with age and degraded contrast conditions lead to longer reading times, thus supporting the conclusion that older readers may benefit particularly from the enhanced contrast of the tablet. Our findings thus indicate that people’s subjective evaluation of digital reading media must be dissociated from the cognitive and neural effort expended in online information processing while reading from such devices.
Wissenschaftliche Kommunikation zeichnet sich durch ein besonders hohes Maß an Standardisierung und Organisation aus. Anforderungen der Objektivität, der Nachvollziehbarkeit und der Authentizität schlagen sich in der Struktur aller wissenschaftlichen Textsorten nieder. Die Kulturtechniken der Schrift sind auf diese Bedingungen ausgerichtet, weshalb das Lesen und Schreiben wissenschaftlicher Texte traditionell besonderen Bedingungen unterliegt, die üblicherweise im Studium vermittelt werden. In diesem Beitrag soll zunächst gezeigt werden, welches die wichtigsten wissenschaftlichen Textsorten sind, welche Eigenschaften sie besitzen und welche Ziele mit Ihnen kommunikativ verfolgt werden. Im zweiten Abschnitt geht es um die Digitalisierung von Texten: Welche Merkmale besitzen digitale Texte und welchen technischen Bedingungen unterliegen sie. Auch wird es hier um das Schreiben digitaler Texte überhaupt gehen. Im letzten Abschnitt dieses Beitrags sehen wir uns die Auswirkungen daraus auf die wissenschaftliche Kommunikation an. Digitale Texte weisen Eigenschaften auf, die die kommunizierten Inhalte zu verändern vermögen. Wie ändert sich das wissenschaftliche Schreiben dadurch?