New Study Reveals: Digitised Books Could Alter The Thought Process
Voracious readers and book enthusiasts have already adapted to a modern type of reading – Digital Reading. For the last few years, owing to technological advancements and large endorsements by retailing industries, this new type of reading habit has seen a noticeable surge. Although, it is environment friendly and economically downscales the production and cost rate, scientists from Dartmouth University have highlighted a negative aspect of such printed-to-digital medium transfer. The recent study warns the readers with a factual speculation; E-reading kills the notion of abstract thoughts and implants informative details in our brain.
Smartphones and tablets are affordable to most of the urban population and e-books are even cheaper. The world had probably found a decisive solution to voluminous books, but now it is proven that these benefits come in exchange of possible anomalies being possessed by the human brain.
The assigned team discovered that the same information processed in either digital or non-digital media affects the construal congruency. According to the results obtained from a psychological event based experiment, printed books open the room for abstract thoughts whereas the digital medium draws the reader’s attention to concrete details.
In the study, the research team had kept most of the external factors constant, in the digital and non-digital platforms. For example, the reading content, font size and format were kept same for both the platforms. The test included 4 levels and a total of more than 300 participants (ages 20-24 years) took part in it.
On the first go, participants were asked to read a comprehensive passage, from where two sets of questions including abstract implications and fact based details were put to them. The result clearly showed, for the abstract based question 66% of printed books reader gave all correct answers whereas only 48% digital readers could match it. Contrastingly persons using the digital medium outperformed printed book readers in terms of fact based questions.
At a later stage, two other tests were performed to prepare the final mark sheet. The research was conducted by Dartmouth’s interdisciplinary team, called Tiltfactor Lab where the main motive is to study games for social impact.
Team leader Geoff Kaufman asserted that their research would underline the point that digitizing contents might lead to alterations in human cognition. However, whether this information is coherent to human health or not is still unclear. The research would be published in the proceedings of ACM CHI '16, the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems to be held on May 07-12, 2016.
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Smartphones and tablets are affordable to most of the urban population and e-books are even cheaper. The world had probably found a decisive solution to voluminous books, but now it is proven that these benefits come in exchange of possible anomalies being possessed by the human brain.
The assigned team discovered that the same information processed in either digital or non-digital media affects the construal congruency. According to the results obtained from a psychological event based experiment, printed books open the room for abstract thoughts whereas the digital medium draws the reader’s attention to concrete details.
In the study, the research team had kept most of the external factors constant, in the digital and non-digital platforms. For example, the reading content, font size and format were kept same for both the platforms. The test included 4 levels and a total of more than 300 participants (ages 20-24 years) took part in it.
On the first go, participants were asked to read a comprehensive passage, from where two sets of questions including abstract implications and fact based details were put to them. The result clearly showed, for the abstract based question 66% of printed books reader gave all correct answers whereas only 48% digital readers could match it. Contrastingly persons using the digital medium outperformed printed book readers in terms of fact based questions.
At a later stage, two other tests were performed to prepare the final mark sheet. The research was conducted by Dartmouth’s interdisciplinary team, called Tiltfactor Lab where the main motive is to study games for social impact.
Team leader Geoff Kaufman asserted that their research would underline the point that digitizing contents might lead to alterations in human cognition. However, whether this information is coherent to human health or not is still unclear. The research would be published in the proceedings of ACM CHI '16, the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems to be held on May 07-12, 2016.
Source:#-Link-Snipped-#
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