[HN Gopher] Reading on smartphone affects sigh generation, brain...
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Reading on smartphone affects sigh generation, brain activity, and
comprehension
Author : yamrzou
Score : 160 points
Date : 2022-02-02 18:17 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| yehoshuapw wrote:
| a few key differences come to mind:
|
| * screen type vs paper
|
| * size
|
| * attention span reduction (even without notifications and so on,
| a phone automatically gets a negative amount of focus on a single
| thing)
|
| * "lost cost" to start using
|
| trying each of those specifically is possible - and will hint at
| much more.
| lysium wrote:
| In the Materials they mention that screen and paper were of
| same size and (!) weight.
| agumonkey wrote:
| 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.
| brimble wrote:
| > 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.
| jeromegv wrote:
| It was iBooks! Was launched alongside the iPad
|
| https://www.macrumors.com/2010/05/07/apple-to-begin-
| internat...
| _the_inflator wrote:
| For context, China banned phones in school due to this reason:
| https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55902778
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| Cool study that involves thirty four individuals and no
| underlying reason why this is occurring...
| betwixthewires wrote:
| I don't really buy it and I'm willing to bet it cannot be
| reproduced.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| That's the joke...
| Weryj wrote:
| 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.
| spicybright wrote:
| chrischapman wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| What? Do old people sigh more/less than young people?
|
| I think the experiment measures respiration, oxygenation and
| sigh frequency to correlate it with brain activity, not as an
| age metric.
|
| Edit: OMG just understood it was a joke...
| moron4hire wrote:
| Generating sighs from the respiratory system, not a generation
| of people known as "Sigh".
| buzzwords wrote:
| I wonder if there is some sort of trade off (cognitively
| speaking).
| [deleted]
| polskibus wrote:
| 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 ?
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| 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.
| Syonyk wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0]: https://news.utexas.edu/2017/06/26/the-mere-presence-of-
| your...
| iamcurious wrote:
| 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.
| nottorp wrote:
| Hmm but is it the screen, or the interruptions?
|
| Personally I don't feel like i have trouble reading on either
| epaper or a tablet, but in either case all the notifications are
| off.
| omarhaneef wrote:
| 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.
| ravenstine wrote:
| 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.
| idatum wrote:
| +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.
|
| The state of the internet. Sigh.
| linspace wrote:
| 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.
| amelius wrote:
| The smartphone equivalent of a "sigh" is the back-button/swipe.
| matco11 wrote:
| 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.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| 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.
| kbenson wrote:
| 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.
| troupe wrote:
| 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.
| vagabund wrote:
| 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.
| kristianp wrote:
| 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.
| Laforet wrote:
| 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.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| > 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.
|
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/reading-paper-scr...
|
| And repost my comment from one of those times:
|
| >> 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.
|
| > Reading on e-reader is more linear than reading a paper book.
| See: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/reading-paper-
| scr... https://insights.uksg.org/articles/10.1629/uksg.236/ and
| https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/aug/19/readers-absorb...
|
| > 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 (a 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.
| meristohm wrote:
| 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.
| webmobdev wrote:
| 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.
| hammock wrote:
| For those clueless as to the importance of "sigh generation" (as
| I was), here is a paper that goes into it:
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4427060/
| [deleted]
| marto1 wrote:
| Steam rolling children's dopamine receptors since birth doesn't
| have a positive effect on their long-term development ? Who would
| have known /s
| awinter-py wrote:
| 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
| jdrc wrote:
| It will be a very good thing if phones start being treated as
| dumbing-down addictive habits as bad as smoking used to be.
| iamcurious wrote:
| 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.
| jdofaz wrote:
| 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.
| Syonyk wrote:
| 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.
| 015a wrote:
| 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.
| a-dub wrote:
| 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.
| DavideNL wrote:
| 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".
| [deleted]
| zacharyz wrote:
| 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).
| crdrost wrote:
| 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...
| andai wrote:
| 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.
| AlanYx wrote:
| >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.
| ortusdux wrote:
| 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.
| Syonyk wrote:
| 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.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Well, I tend to sigh a lot when reading some sites on my phone...
| iamsanteri wrote:
| 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/
| malepoon wrote:
| 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.
| colordrops wrote:
| It doesn't help that most movies (these days? Always?) are
| not worthy of attention.
| lolive wrote:
| 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...
| ravenstine wrote:
| Yes, shame! That film is wonderful.
| monkeybutton wrote:
| 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I leave mine on silent, however, my 2FA app is on the phone.
| Getting up to retrieve from another at each auth request
| would be tiresome. Maybe time to get a Yubikey like device
| instead???
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