Abstract
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.
Highlights
IntroductionIn the United States and the United Kingdom, sales of electronic books (e-books) have already overtaken those of print books and are continuing to increase rapidly (see Text S1 in the Supporting Information for additional details)
Reading is becoming an increasingly digital pastime
The combination of eyetracking and EEG within a concurrent measurement setup has been shown to be methodologically feasible and a potential means of gaining new insights on the neurocognitive bases of natural reading [31,32,33,34,35]. (Note that the acquisition of concurrent EEG and eye movement measures was long considered impossible because eye movements lead to artefacts in the EEG signal.) In the present study, we capitalised upon this methodological advance in order to obtain both neurophysiological measures (EEG) and rapid, highly automatic behavioural responses as a function of information processing in reading from digital media as opposed to a traditional paper page
Summary
In the United States and the United Kingdom, sales of electronic books (e-books) have already overtaken those of print books and are continuing to increase rapidly (see Text S1 in the Supporting Information for additional details). Scientific texts, too, are progressing towards exclusively digital dissemination, with many journals – such as PLOS ONE – appearing only in electronic form, and many of the leading international scientific organisations (e.g. Max Planck Society, Wellcome Trust) endorsing the use of digital media in combination with open access to further the dissemination of scientific publications Though digital book sales doubled from 2010 to 2011 in Germany, readers were still reluctant to accept e-books and e-book sales accounted for only 1% of overall book sales in Germany in 2011
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