It's not only comprehension decline, it's a combination of decreasing attention spans and the substitution of your memory by an electronic device (calendar, notes, etc.). I've been writing about what's happened to me during the COVID lockdowns, and I think quite a few of HN people share the feeling that one can barely even read a normal book at length these days... Here's my actual writeup from back in early 2021: https://www.lostbookofsales.com/age-of-distractions/
Individual experience reports are nice, yet it does not really account to a decent study.
Reading the paper mentioned, I also feel that we need more than just experience reports (e.g. comments and feelings in forums like hackernews) and controlled experiments.
Comprehension is down, yet I wonder about recall and the general amount of information we are processing. As we experience a lot of information in context, it might lead to a decrease in overall comprehension, yet a stronger recall on the bits we do remember. It would be super interesting to setup a larger scale in-situ study on the topic. Yet, I wonder how to get a baseline on that.
Where I am mostly unable to read normal books these days I am able to read thousands of pages (250-275 words) of webfiction a week if I have the time. I wonder where the difference lies between these? The type of content or the actual physical action of "grabbing a book and getting some relaxing time".
He, I always wondered if someone would use that. Sure, pages aren't technically a necessity anymore, but I think continuous scrolling is the absolute worst. Turning a page gives opportunity for a pause. Sounds weird, but I somehow need that for reading longer books.
I've started leaving my phone on silent and sitting on my kitchen table while I'm working. Just having it within arms reach at my desk has become too much at times. The lack of focus wasn't nearly this bad at the beginning of the pandemic for me.
I've silenced my phone 8 or 9 years ago and it's been like that since then. (With unmuting it very occasionally. Like a few times a year, maybe.) The notification frequency must have grown a lot since then.
I have no idea how people can deal with their phone beeping and vibrating constantly. Actually, I get annoyed pretty quickly when e.g. my partner leaves her phone in the room.
I've been doing the same thing for a few months now. At first I had it set up to shut up after 6 pm, but these days it's just completely silent. I check it every so often, on my own terms, because there are some things that I do want to engage with—a call or a text message, for example.
Still, I've had to push back against the expectation of being available 24/7 and responding immediately to everything. A text that goes unanswered for a few minutes becomes a phone call or three, to ask why I'm not responding. It's bloody exhausting sometimes.
As for me, people have learnt that they can't reach me most of the time instantly. You don't have to answer the phone calls either. You can say later that you didn't see it and your phone was muted (which is true). People get used to it pretty quickly. I guess, for most people it's just a few family members or other very close relations anyway. Romantic partners are the worst, of course, in this regard. One has to be smart to set the expectations at the very beginning. (I guess it can be done later too, though.)
I have had my smartphone on vibrate-only since pretty much the beginning of having a smartphone, as I find it much less distracting than audio notifications, and much easier to ignore. I have almost all notifications turned off, except for calls and texts, and notifications from my security system. It's that last thing that prevents me from being able to leave my phone out of sight all the time.
I leave mine on silent, however, my 2FA app is on the phone. Getting up to retrieve from another room at each auth request would be tiresome. Maybe time to get a Yubikey like device instead???
I’d advice setting up a password store[0] which does allow to get OTP codes right on the same device, but of course, it kinda defeats the purpose of 2FA but I still use it for not so important stuff.
imo, as long as you combine "something you know" and "something you have," the effect is the same. So if you store your 2fa encrypted with a on your computer with a key only you know, it accomplishes the same thing.
Anyone who’s used Apple 2FA on a Mac would be familiar with this - you can take the code from the same computer you’re using to log on to the Apple service.
To be honest I only notice that with movies. Books are fine, TV show episodes are usually fine, but long movies I can have a hard time concentrating on. Maybe because I can easily change my reading speed to keep my mind occupied.
It would be easy to say "today's movies aren't as interesting as the ones of 20 years ago" but that would be ignoring that I changed in those years - namely, I've seen a lot more movies and read a lot more books and watched a lot more TV.
It would be unsurprising for someone to say "not everything I liked at first still holds up today."
But I apply the same reasoning against my forward-looking watching/reading: "I've seen so much more now that fewer things impress me at first, as I have so much more to compare with."
So a book that's only mildly capturing my attention? I can speed up my reading, skim a bit more over the uninteresting parts. A movie? So much harder!
I have also found this to be the case. I can easily sit down and read something enjoyable for hours on end, but I try to watch a movie and within 20 minutes I'm wishing I was anywhere else. TV shows inhabit a kind of middle ground between the two, they're still tolerable but I find myself enjoying them less over time.
I can't say I really regret this change, I haven't noticed any real downsides. There's too much content and not enough time these days.
What about older movies? I watched movies from the 90s and they were great and able to keep my attention very well. Almost every modern movie though I can barely stay awake for the first 20 minutes..
I think Movies just suck because TV shows are where all the good production is happening.
Making a good and compelling movie is really really hard, and now you can just churn out superhero stuff and make millions or do a TV show and have nearly none of the constraints of cinema.
A lot of modern movies feel like slightly higher budget TV shows. There’s still some truly great stuff, but oftentimes I’m wondering where the 200 million dollars went. I feel like movies are increasingly being made for a TV screen and streaming services, so a lot of the grandiose nature of older movies is fading.
The 90s was an odd period with countless great movies and massive budgets.
same. I wish Amazon would allow rental of a movie for 2 weeks so I could watch a film in small segments. I no longer rent movies at all because often the running time is too much to complete in just 2 days.
I've found myself using speedup controls to watch movies and TV shows faster and it's actually helped me concentrate on them more as there are fewer "lulls" where I'll pick up my phone or something.
45 years old here.
I usually go to the theater for a proper appreciation of the movies (big screen, no solicitations).
Last movie I saw was Charlie Chaplin's City lights.
Downloaded it for my kids (the exact kind of public for this film). They stayed in front of the TV set for 15 minutes before wanting to play yet another game of Hearthstone.
Shame...
I see that as a pure contextual behaviour.
Let's say I switch Internet off and let them watch the same movie, and they will stay focused during the whole 87 minutes.
Attention is a task dependent context. I can drive for hours with no incident but be bored by a meeting in 5 minutes. Very little to link the two, because they're not the same by any metric outside of time. To average that out is oversimplying to absurdity.
Secondly, this myth has been debunked _thoroughly_. I don't have offhand access to the papers but I will add some write ups about it. But the state of attention report report 2018 is a good place to start if you feel like a Google hunt.
Third, most all of the theories around a shrinking attention span are based on unreplicated drivel. And it is drivel. Psychology is a new field still figuring out it's limits and medicine predates science and has a lot of falsehoods-presented-as-fact (this is a huge problem and contributes to the rise of anti vaxxers). Not a lot of evidence so much as opinions.
I find the idea that I comprehend something less than if i had it on paper to be hilarious. I grew up on screens, maybe I'm just accustomed to it, but i have decades of learning mundane and complex subject matter via various tech portals. There is so much evidence that this happens on a large enough scale to dismiss this nonsense here and now
> A path analysis suggests that the interactive relationship between sigh inhibition and overactivity in the prefrontal cortex causes comprehension decline.
I want to be careful about being a technology reactionary and just finding confirmation bias: e.g., I'm tired of change and find something that confirms my frustration.
One trick I use to shake up my persective is to remember the other side of the equation: When change occurs, some things are lost, but also some are gained. In some ways, I expect we function better reading on screens. Or I try to look at it the other way, remembering that there is nothing more natural about the older technology (usually) - it's only what we are accustomed to - i.e., what if instead of moving from technology A to B, we were moving from B to A? And then remembering: A has matured (being older); B usually has not but, if adopted, will mature.
One thing I would guess, if moving from screen to paper, is that the technology wouldn't keep up with our cognitive processing; I think we just accept that paper is that way, but personally, having switched to reading PDFs (with bookmarks, search, etc.), I find paper very slow for any sort of random access. Also, I expect that as screen reading tech matures, the level of stress distraction will become much less. As a simple example, look at the recent boom (afaict) of applications offering and people using dark mode and night color mode.
Another trick I use is to remember the outcomes for past reactionaries: They are popular and self-justified in the moment, but in the end all they did was waste time and miss out.
The reason that comprehension is decreased, is that when using a smartphone, you are mentally in the "world" of the smart phone, no doubt different for each person, but for me involving a bunch of unconscious behaviors such as: swiping, changing from app to app, scrolling, etc. The phone is a focal point & battleground of the attention economy. So many forces attacking your attention, few of which are in your best interests or serve your goals.
An iPhone can be configured to work in your interests, but it takes quite a bit of effort. Aggressively curate the notifications. Turn most of them off. Put the phone on silent. Turn on all the "humane" features Apple has developed: the focuses, "wind-down," the sleep aids, etc. At night, leave your phone on your desk. Do not take it into your bedroom. Read a book in the bedroom.
Try to use the phone to achieve specific goals, which you pre-mediate. That's the goal.
Paper books exist in a totally different and simpler economy. It's not that they're perfect, but they're simpler. They're more about authors genuinely communicating their thoughts directly to you. There's an innocence lacking from smartphones.
You can feel this if you pay attention. A smartphone gives me a stimulated, "something cool around the next corner," "on the verge of fulfillment" kind of feeling. That's why it can suck you in for literal hours if you let it. The feeling in many cases is a lie. You'll find yourself just swiping and tapping for no reason at all, just automatically, unconsciously. That's the trick of "variable rewards" e.g. a phone is a slot machine. A book is a quieter more peaceful feeling. You're just reading the author's words, one after another. You have no option to switch to something else. The magic of books is created by your own active attention & focus. Some people can probably achieve this on a phone, but it's definitely harder.
One thing I found really helpful on Android is using "Extreme Battery Saver Mode" basically all the time.
It turns off ~all apps fully, and makes you click through a dialog to enter one - and then click again after 5 minutes or the app turns off again.
The downside is that you don't get notifications from messaging apps, which can be a problem (or amazing) depending on your situation. Whitelisting messaging apps would defeat the battery-saving purpose, of course.
I am not sure this study is definitely convincing…
…but I wonder if the extra amount of scrolling one has to do on smartphones compared to printed books could be distracting and lowering comprehension.
Also, when I try to remember something I have red on a printed book, - sometimes - I can remember where on the page it was written, what else was on the page, or even what the page looked like.
I experience none of that when reading on my smartphone.
I don't know if it's the scrolling per se, so much as the more general psychological relationship we have with phones whose hardware and OS are designed to tantalize and distract. The majority of our prior experiences on the device will have primed our brain for something antithetical to the long-term concentrative state that's necessary for deep comprehension. By the same token of the advice for insomniacs to reserve your bed strictly for sleep, there's value in having purpose-built objects instead of just a singular omnipotent slab of glass.
There was another study that found that people remember things better when reading a heavier book instead of a light one. The obvious solution is to glue a brick to the back of your phone...
But seriously, the form and tactile sense of the object in your hand seems to be related to how well you remember things. The trend on phones may be moving away from what makes things easier to remember.
> Also, when I try to remember something I have red on a printed book, - sometimes - I can remember where on the page it was written, what else was on the page, or even what the page looked like. I experience none of that when reading on my smartphone.
This is so obvious to me but more than once I have hit the typical robot HN user on this topic for whom it doesn't matter the medium because he's an eidetic machine. So I'll just post this:
> Beyond treating individual letters as physical objects, the human brain may also perceive a text in its entirety as a kind of physical landscape. When we read, we construct a mental representation of the text in which meaning is anchored to structure. The exact nature of such representations remains unclear, but they are likely similar to the mental maps we create of terrain—such as mountains and trails—and of man-made physical spaces, such as apartments and offices. Both anecdotally and in published studies, people report that when trying to locate a particular piece of written information they often remember where in the text it appeared. We might recall that we passed the red farmhouse near the start of the trail before we started climbing uphill through the forest; in a similar way, we remember that we read about Mr. Darcy rebuffing Elizabeth Bennett on the bottom of the left-hand page in one of the earlier chapters.
>> The value provided by a physical map of a book is knowing how far along you are in the book, yet that's also available in a visual form in an ebook as well. You can even riffle through pages on most e-readers as well, seeing a preview of the page as you move quickly forward or backwards.
>> Aside from weight, what value is the physical map really providing?
> No, it provides more.
> Actually your brain maps physical properties of the book to actual content, creating an overlay map over the story or the content (and our brain is really good at mentally mapping things). This is that map that is being used to know where in the book a particular piece of information is.
> Besides, no e-reader today can let your riffle through pages as fast as paper book.
> When you are in a novel, or in a manual, you have some kinetic and touch feedback to build memories of where's what. The book becomes an extension (à la proprioception) with much less friction than an e-read for which you have to wait for visual feedback (screen refreshing).
> With paper books things are at the tip of your fingers.
> E-reader have more friction.
> That's a reason why I only read novels on e-reader and jot notes in a notepad for non-fiction books.
> If I had the budget I'd only have physical books.
Much of this resonates with me, as most of the reading in my life is on paper, and I’m curious what the hooks & landmarks are when listening to stories, which we humans (presumably) did for most of our existence as a species (and our ancestors, and any animals alive now who have an oral/aural tradition). Some of my most memorable stories are audiobooks that I attended to ~fully (Shuggie Bain, notably, in part for the narration), letting my imagination augment the story.
It is an interesting idea, but with a physical book you have to turn the page.
And that has to be more distracting, because you can't read any part of the page while it is turning.
But I also had the experience once (and I think most readers has had it more than once) of reading a book and having to stop because somebody turned the lights off - then realizing that I had been so engrossed in a book that several hours had gone by and the sun had gone down by then.
I also feel like my comprehension of physical reading material was better, but it's been a while sine I actually used physical material for learning, so it could also just be my brain is worse at retaining information in my old age. Definitely something I think I'll experiment with though.
The amount of resetting the postion of the eyes back to the start of the next line is much greater on a smartphone. I wonder if the greater effort of scanning affects your brain's ability to sigh and comprehend.
Newspapers and magazines have always formatted long text in narrow columns of 5-7 words. Admittedly I find it very irritating to read every now and then.
Most paperbacks have paragraphs that are about twice as wide (10 to 12 words) and it definitely feels more natural.
I would be interested to see if an e-ink type reader is closer to paper or a smartphone in a test like this. I've generally let myself drift to them for long form reading, but do wonder if it's that much better than an LCD, in terms of how it's processed by the brain. I know it's better than being on a phone or tablet in terms of distractions, though.
For me, while eink devices are better for the eyes, there's practically no difference in my comprehension and retention between eink and LCD; both are markedly worse than a physical book.
It's not, for me at least, the distraction potential. I think its more-so the tertiary sensory experiences physical books carry: the smell of the binding; the dimples & knots in the paper as you trace your finger over lines; the visual clarity of your position in the book relative to what is left; there's a lot that even eink sacrifices. People often say that these qualities are what they enjoy about books, but I suspect it runs even deeper than that; that these qualities add landmarks to your memory, and aid in recall.
i have noticed this myself. there's something about the spatio-tactile sensation along with the imperfections of the pages that can help printed media stick better than digital media, for me.
I once read (somewhere...) that the position of text on the page is also an important factor; when scrolling the position of "the location on the page where you read something" changes constantly, versus paper where the info always stays in the same location.
Apparently, this helps our brain to remember things, better.
So, if you read on an electronic device, it's probably beneficial to configure it to not use "continuous scrolling" but rather use something "fixed".
One huge difference is that the low latency of E-ink means that we don't have scrolling yet.
If you read articles on your phone you may notice that you read in a fundamentally different way then you read printed text. You generally keep your visual field located in exactly one place relative to the phone and then scroll content with your finger up into that space. It's as if you moved the book around while keeping your eyes in one place. On the printed medium your eye stays locked to the corners of the page, the page doesn't scroll out from underneath you.
But of course you are also phrasing an interesting point, which is that screens are usually way brighter than ambient light. To this we can add that a mobile phone is so much smaller than a printed page, you think about the cognitive tasks involved in opening a paper where at first you would open it up wide and be surrounded by word and then you would fold it down to the part that you wanted to read and focus on... Hard to imagine a similar experience on a phone; a set of desktop screens has the right size, but maybe not the ability to effectively expand/condense...
I wonder if the fixity of location provided by printed materials is a significant factor in increased retention. I noticed that I often remember what part of a page I read something on. With a web page, no such "information location structure" exists: the flow of the text changes based on the device and configuration, and instead of discrete pages there's just one big one.
The act of turning a page may also serve some function: the visual content is "refreshed", the patterns on the page are brand new and stimulating. Perhaps the memory for each page is "chunked" in a way that a write to long term storage occurs on pageflip. If so, then infinite scrolling would lead to "buffer overflows".
Another thought about scrolling: I also wonder if the movement of the eyes "across" a page is more stimulating and ergonomic than keeping them in one place, which in my experience gets rather tiring.
>I wonder if the fixity of location provided by printed materials is a significant factor in increased retention. I noticed that I often remember what part of a page I read something on.
I find this to be very much true personally. The spatial organization of words on the page seems to provide a trellis that helps structure how I recall information. So much so that I intentionally convert epubs and other long-form documents to PDF these days before reading. I find this becomes even more important on material where I'm writing comments in the margins; the spatial relationship between the comments and the text helps me to recall both.
I also tend to favour software tools that try to preserve the spatial relationship between pages. On Sony and Fujitsu e-readers, for example, when you pinch out, the display transitions to a 16-page contact sheet view that doesn't shift depending on what page you were just reading. At first blush, it seems lazy, why not show the current page and the prior 7 and subsequent 8 pages instead? But after a while you start to realize that it's to help structure your spatial position within the document, a little like how in a book the left hand pages are always to the right of the right hand pages.
I have been doing a lot of kindle reading lately and have noticed that I sleep easier when I transition to the actual e-ink device versus reading on my phone. I suspect it is due to the backlight (blue light, which has been shown to effect sleep and intensity).
My bet is on the issue being the interactivity associated with phones and computers, not just the display medium.
You'll have just as hard of a time concentrating on your 5000 dpi perfectly lambertian eink display in 2030 as you do now on your phone, simply because it's a multimedia device built around capturing and redirecting your attention.
It's worth pointing out that this is "published" in Nature Scientific Reports, which has (by design!) A very low barrier for publishing/peer review. It's just a small step up from arxiv. This also means we shouldn't take this report too seriously until it's published in a serious journal
not really ... anybody with 3 people vetting them can upload to arxiv.
Nature Scientific Reports have a decent review cycle.
Yes, it's easier to get in than into Nature or other top level publications.
Yet, it's still harder than some 2nd 3rd tier conferences (at least in computer science).
However, I agree with your sentiment. Don't take it too serious
Interesting to hear, i was not aware of that! In my subfield (Machine Learning) publishing in Scientific Reports would be considered 3rd tier at best (frankly, i don't know anyone who's ever done it, because the community would just ignore it)... What field are you in?
still, I wasn't aware they had an impact factor of 4.x, that's way higher than i thought.
It's nice to see the data gathered even if there's no hypothesis at the end. It could be that a paper book is a better learning medium than a screen, but I suspect that smartphones are very, very needy devices, and subconsciously we expect a notification to pop up sooner or later and derail our train of thought. Smartphones are made for quick reads and instant satisfactions, not prolonged lecture.
Anecdata: I frequently read books on my smartphone, but I'll put it in airplane or focus mode to rest easy that there will be no interruptions in a while. I've tried to read on a tablet, but the smartphone pinging from the desktop across the room can be very distracting.
There was a study [0] that demonstrated that even having your smartphone near you - shut off, on the desk - reduced your ability to focus and concentrate.
That's one of the reasons I've moved as much as I can to an e-reader, I know it won't interrupt me with other stuff.
It says that groups with the phone in their pocket focused better than those with phone face down on the table.
Having something that can not be lost, forgotten or misplaced, in a place you are not used too have it could reduce focus too. Maybe the same lost of focus would happen with keys, or credit cards.
As a frequent sigher I found most amusing the part about measuring the number of sighs. I had to dwelve deep in the article to find why it's significant:
"Previous studies have indicated that the number of sighs increased with increased cognitive load[14,21]. In our study, the number of sighs increased during cognitive reading activity on a paper medium and decreased when reading on a smartphone."
My anecdotal experience is that I sigh when tired, so the research passes my tests.
Also, I love physical books. I love holding them, opening them, and of course, reading. If possible with a pencil in my hand.
Youtube can be viewed as a micro-education platform and this seamless dissemination of information for those who seek it will start to balance out the loss of traditionally valued skills such as remmebering and regurertating tainted points of view pushed on the masses by whoever is connected enough to influence the countries politcal system.
ie. It could be argued that some western nations feel dumbed down by mobile phones, while people in underdeveloped nations see it as a on-ramp to modernisation and a vector of information discovery instead of a vector of distraction.
ie. Right now i am learning to weld off an old Canandian body work man on the other side of the world, like taking an apprentiship with a master in the comfort of my home, on demand. Ive never enabled notifications on my phone, its always on silent, ive never installed a FAANG app on it, i use my phone as a tool. Im getting a education that would cost me time x dollars x effort if i was enroll in a traditional technical collage.
Just because your have found yourself searching for meaning in your life through your phone distractions, doesnt mean its a bad thing. Its your body telling you that while you may be making some money right now, your actually not persuring a dream that is satisfying your inner yerning for a meaningful existance.
I cant watch a movie at length anymore, but i can keep my phone next to me for an entire day and actually forget its there enough to go looking for it in other place when i actually need it. I love my work though, coding is a hobby turned passion turned career turned never worked a day in my life after quitting k-mart at 20 to live it. Yet im divorced from a doctor who spent every hour of every day she was not working, distracting herself with her phone, gaming, ignoring the world, obsessed with stalking people on facebook, getting despressed with her life, trying to bandaid it with InstaSatisfation, because of all the trauma she has suffered yet never dealt with. On the outside, she is a success of a women, and will save your life in the ER; but in every other situation, she is a complete mess on the verge of suicide due to unresolved PTSD.
Your education, or your job does not define you. You are more then your successes (and your failures) and the WWW has allowed people to see this at scale more then anytime in history. its reshaping our society, and what we grew up with, what our parents valued, is slowly fading away for a new modern set of skills. Those modern skills dont resolve around books, or attention. But the ability to wade through through loads of crap to find the gems that add value to your existance. Not distract from it.
I recently discovered that it is very comfortable to read eBooks on my big screen tv (connected to a computer) from the couch. I like not having to hold anything and being able to sit in a comfortable position.
I'm wondering how dumb ebook readers would compare vs paper.
I got a kindle last year. Since then I've been reading (mostly novels) for at least 45 mins every day. Some weekend days I read for like 2-3 hours. It's been wonderful. My iPad Pro has been collecting dust for months.
My gut feel is that this effect on comprehension, and increased prefrontal cortex activation, both happen because phones have so many distractions.
The whole time I'm reading something on a phone my brain is constantly pinging me about all the other things that I do on my phone: emails/WhatsApp/Google word I don't know.
So our conscious control centres in the PFC are always firing to mediate these little temptations. There are less of these temptations on a e-reader.
I find I remember things better in a paper book than a phone (for sure!) and possibly even a Kindle.
There's something about keeping my fingers in other page sections, folding over the corners of useful pages (even if I never revisit), and remembering the location of information on the page. In college I would often remember WHERE a detail was located, but I didn't know the detail itself. It's like my brain was creating an index to the data based on its approximate page location and the location within the page itself (and crucially whether it was on the left side or the right side of the book when open).
I wonder whether forcing yourself to breath a bit deeper during reading would increase comprehension. Or stopping after page or two for a couple of deep breaths. Most importantly, perhaps one can focus better when programming by controling own breath ?
This is interesting. Perhaps if the breath reminds you to relax and stay on your chosen focus, though I would be doubtful that increased oxygen intake is directly a cause.
I'm not sure about increased comprehension directly, because I've heard that the best way is to more actively engage with the material (e.g. by asking yourself questions about what you read), but there may be a link to mindfulness.
scrolling, or generally anything that mutates the viewport, vastly reduces my reading speed
maybe this is just my training and gen Z can handle it fine? but scrolling feels like mandatory vertical layout jank to get to page 2
enlightened UX archaeologists from the future will look back with humane pity on a web with increasingly prevalent sticky headers that destroy keyboard-based paging
Perhaps, I read a lot on my phone (usually web novels). I keep my eyes fixed on a spot on my screen, usually reading 2 lines, and scroll to bring the next lines into my line of sight. This is very comfortable for me as I don't have to move my eyes around. I also think this increases my reading efficiency, although I haven't really done an A/B test to verify this
This has a fundamentally faulty premise that smartphones and paper are equals in delivering reading material, or that their format is preferable.
Learning platforms such as Duolingo, Brilliant, or Khan Academy very infrequently give you a wall of text to parse. This suggests, that it isn’t a necessity or preferable for comprehension.
So to me, this feels silly. As if someone is complaining that a bike hurts your ability to leisurely move at a walking pace through a park.
Why was there an expectation that it would be more ideal?
Use tools are that are appropriate for the context.
For long form text, use a context that allows you to consume slowly, whether than be an e-book or hard copy.
> This suggests, that it isn’t a necessity or preferable for comprehension.
Or, it shows that they're trying to get people to stay around and use them more. I actually really doubt Duolingo produces anyone who has true comprehension in reading a passage of text simply because it only ever asks you to translate one-off sentences (and rarely at that, it only has you click words if you're on the app!). I don't think they're optimizing for comprehension and understanding as much as they're optimizing for user engagement.
If Duo ever moves on to passages and short stories, then it's only on a few of the trees, and only at the end level. I've done everything on the Irish (tested out, as I already speak it fluently) and it never rose above a few sentences being translated. And the French one that I've done so far (about half) is the same apart from the 'Stories' feature which really isn't that great as it just has you click missing words and doesn't ask about comprehension.
> Which leaves me lost in your premise of "true comprehension"?
"True comprehension" in a foreign language is, in my opinion, when you can read a full passage (not a random sentence or even something like Duo's stories) and answer questions about it. It doesn't have to be a literary passage, but it shouldn't be something as simple as "Translate to English: Mes frères sont gentils", as the French course often asks (and then only makes you pick words, not actually type). And the comprehension should be inferring something from the passage, not something you can get by just matching word patterns.
So, again, maybe DL does it later on in the French course, but it certainly isn't available in their (horrible, to be honest) Irish course.
> a wall of text to parse. This suggests, that it isn’t a necessity or preferable for comprehension.
No, that suggests that those platforms understand the limitations of the medium and try to work around them - with mixed results. They still have to use a modicum of text, they just build other stuff around it to reinforce meaning.
Your critique would be valid if these platforms were not using any text whatsoever - which might well happen at some point, in the distant future, but definitely is not the case now.
Hypothesis: we are primed to expect ads to pop up, or some other interruption, when we read on phones, and even when those intrusions are held at bay, we have retain the expectation that they will emerge.
+1 on this. I expect some kind of flashing ad or pop up, where that expectation itself is a distraction. It's rare that it's not a website I'm reading on mobile.
And just a quick reminder for anyone reading this, disabling scripting by default for sites mostly solves the issue of delayed popup modals. The uBlock Origin element blocker can take care of anything that makes it through if JavaScript must be enabled. This is what I've been doing for the last few years and I haven't looked back. If a blog or article can't be viewed without JavaScript, then it probably wasn't worth reading.
Likewise, I keep my phone on Do Not Disturb at all times, and have it configured to allow numbers in my contacts to ring through in case of emergencies. Everything else is silent.
These things have significantly decreased the activity in the part of my brain that expects distractions and adverse UI patterns at any moment.
Interruptions are a good theory, but it seems unlikely they would have people use their own phones for the experiment, as that would introduce as many variables as there are participants. I would think they just hand everyone a 'clean' phone with no apps on it.
I'd love to see the difference between someone reading a phone-sized piece of paper, a phone, a non-touch LCD that only shows a block of text, and a similarly sized e-ink screen.
Misleading graphs: in the results section, figure 1, the y-axis for the first graph ("Score of reading test") starts at 6, which makes it look like the paper medium has double the comprehension score of the smartphone medium -- actually it's only about 9 vs 7.5. A difference for sure, but not nearly as big as it visually appears.
Thinking about it, a lot of people stopped smoking right when smartphones became a thing. Smoking was not just about the smoke, but about the social circle it created. I wonder how deep the analogy goes.
Something that I've felt and heard some people on youtube verbalize: we miss side channel stimulation. Holding a book, folding pages, the texture, the smell.
I wanted pdf to improve my reading but very very often is stalls, even on networkless tablets.
> Holding a book, folding pages, the texture, the smell.
This is the reason I can only tolerate reading ebooks in iBooks. If they ever remove the ability to idly mess with page corners in a way that feels almost like a physical object, I guess I'm just done with ebooks. Other readers I've seen with faux-page-turning don't do it right. They don't allow partial turns (just a page-turning animation—not the same thing, and always hideous), only allow a tiny amount of partial turn before the whole page flips over, or it doesn't feel closely-enough connected to your input. Even iBooks could be a lot better, but it's good enough.
[EDIT] Apple Books, rather. Was it ever iBooks, or did I invent that? Either way, that's the program I'm talking about.
I wonder if this has to do with how our brain associates the importance of us reading something on the smartphone vs. reading something on paper.
We spend much of our developing years reading from paper and taking tests, which may be telling our brains that things we've read on paper are likely to be of importance and worth remembering. Whereas smartphone use is mostly to browse / pass time so how brain takes things we've read via smartphone to not be as important.
Perhaps the study would show different results if there was a generation of children whose school textbooks were primarily digital and had little social media use.
Keep in mind the internet is also one of the only places where young Chinese might get exposed to English and western content. Can you imagine a Chinese child having a conversation with a young American and learning that they have multiple parties? Checks and balances? Tiananmen Square?
Unfortunately the p-values that are significant are only nominally significant. If you do a null experiment enough times it will sometimes look significant - even a broken clock is wrong sometimes.
This doesn’t mean the paper isn’t detecting a real effect, its just that the noise in these experiments is large and the techniques or sample size insufficient to confidently overcome that noise. It’s a great contribution to it’s field, but I won’t be changing my habits based off it.
I don't think it reduces my comprehension, but I have noticed that it does have some effect on my memory - I have some trouble recollecting something I have read online. I don't know if this is because of over consumption (there's too much information and we want to consume it all) or if it's a learned behaviour of not making an effort to remember it since you can access the information again in the future easily through search or bookmarks.
I'm a big fan of waldenpond.press, a service that pulls articles from your pocket reading list, binds them into a book, and mails them to you once a month.
That sounds both amazing and a bit wasteful of paper, though if it's more of a magazine than a newspaper, I might have to try that out! I definitely don't need a permanent bound copy of some random Atlantic or Vox article.
I wonder if this is due to the attention economy with mobile devices. Pure speculation, but since we already associate a lot of other activities with a mobile devices, we may have a hard time isolating the activity and focus.
Not sure if you're being humorous but just in case, it means the 'making of a sigh' as in 'generating something new' rather than a 'group of people'. As a joke, it works for my generation. The older I get the more I sigh and these days it has a lot to do with cookie banners. But that's another matter.
