On writing, memory, and forgetting

I only recently encountered the Zeignarik Effect (that people remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks) for the first time  in a book on concentration, and had only thought about it in negative terms, since it could lead to constant distraction as unfinished tasks repeatedly popped back into mind. So intriguing (and after consideration very plausible) to think that it might have a more general and positive role in maintaining memories, or at least the ones that matter (which maybe are just those that are still 'open'). In this article, Maria Konnikova wonders if this effect was something that has been recognized as far back as Socrates, and whether his warnings then against the written word might be relevant today with respect to our embracing of online tools and databases. In both cases we are delegating the mental effort of memory to something external to us, and while this is  useful and necessary for the preservation of the data itself, it is perhaps worth considering what the affect it has on our own remaining awareness of that information, once we have successfully 'shelved' it. Indeed she even mentions a study which suggested that people are far less able to recall information that they expect to be able to have access to in the future. Socrates on Google, now that's prescient....

On writing, memory, and forgetting: Socrates and Hemingway take on Zeigarnik
Some extracts from Konnikova 's article :

• I can't help but think of an admonition that came centuries before Ms. Zeigarnik sat down to her Viennese coffee: Socrates? reproach in The Phaedrus that the written word is the enemy of memory. In the dialogue, Socrates recounts the story of the god Theuth, or Ammon, who offers the king Thamus the gift of letters:

 This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners? souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.

• In this [Hemingway's] view, talking something through?completing it, so to speak, off the page?impedes the ability to actually create it to its fullest potential. Somehow, that act of closure, of having talked through a piece of work, takes away the motivation to finish.
• the advice offered by the author Justin Taylor: "Don't take notes. This is counterintuitive, but bear with me. You only get one shot at a first draft, and if you write yourself a note to look at later then that's what your first draft was?a shorthand, cryptic, half-baked fragment"
• Hemingway seems to be, in many ways, on the same page as Socrates and the same page as Zeigarnik and her foundational studies of our memories? curious quirks. What's more, the more we know about memory, the more true it seems to be that we somehow let go of the information that we no longer feel we absolutely must hold on to. Last year, a study by Betsy Sparrow and colleagues, published in Science, suggested that people are far less able to recall information that they expect to be able to have access to in the future. Instead, they remember where and how to find that information.- I would never give up the ability to record, to access, to research endless topics at the click of a button. But, with Hemingway and Socrates never far from mind, I may be slightly more cautious about how I use that ability.

note : the paper "Google Effects on Memory" is discussed in this article, and the abstract is :


Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips
Betsy Sparrow1,*,Jenny Liu2,Daniel M. Wegner
The advent of the Internet, with sophisticated algorithmic search engines, has made accessing information as easy as lifting a finger. No longer do we have to make costly efforts to find the things we want. We can ?Google? the old classmate, find articles online, or look up the actor who was on the tip of our tongue. The results of four studies suggest that when faced with difficult questions, people are primed to think about computers and that when people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it. The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves.

Text Advertising Blindness: The New Banner Blindness?

Since I personally think I don't just ignore, but hardly even register (at least consciously) ads in google and facebook etc., then interesting to read about a paper which suggests this is a real psychological phenomenon (abstract here, full paper here)
This is not just relevant to advertisers, since a corrolary to this 'advertising blindness' is that real information might also be ignored if it is easily confused with being advertising, e.g. on the right hand side of the page where ads are often placed.
Some points from the study are :

• Users demonstrate text advertisement ?blindness? when viewing web pages. This means that information displayed in areas of the page dedicated to text ads (e.g., top of the page, right side) is generally ignored or viewed last.
• Users are less likely to find information on a web page if it is located on the right side of the page than on the top of the page if both areas resemble text ads. This is especially true when they are searching for specific information.
• When conducting an informational, or semantic, search, users have equal amount of difficulty finding information that is embedded in an ad either at the top or on the right side of the page.
• The perception of whether a region is perceived as advertising affects how web pages are searched. When a region is seen as advertisements, users will scan the area if it necessitates completing their task and will likely do so only after scanning other content areas. However, if the region is perceived as content, users will integrate the area into their search strategy, possibly as an expected location for their search goal or a location covered by a heuristic.
• Users typically associate the right side of a web page with text ads and consequently view this area of the page last or not at all. As a result, both designers and advertisers should use caution when placing content information on the right side of the page

Screen vs. Paper, some information and thoughts

I had assumed the 'retina' (eye can't detect individual pixels at the normal usage distance) display on the latest ipad was really about more impressive graphics, i.e. for games and video playback, but was very interested to see the comment that such displays would make a difference to simple reading.

It seems that the low quality of electronic displays has been postulated to result in significantly slower reading speeds with respect to paper, and the idea is that such vastly improved screens will overcome this. The article linked above says that reading is about half as fast on a standard resolution kindle versus paper, but also that there has not been a lot of recent research on the topic, and one of the most important references is a paper from as far back as 2001 (which suggested 10-30% speed differences).

This is a fascinating area which I think is of increasing importance as screen input becomes more and more the default mechanism, not just for offices, but for schools, colleges and even hobby reading at home.

The 'google scholar' service is an excellent resource for the layman (like myself) to search for related papers, for example those on screen and paper reading differences . What follows are the results from a brief investigation of the topic; however this is something I must return to again, and deal with in more detail.

What the studies say 
One (more) recent (2008) paper  ("Computer- vs. paper-based tasks: Are they equivalent?" provides a nice overview of the state of the literature at that time. According to this paper, pre-1991 many studies indeed resulted in some indication that paper reading was better in terms of reading speed, accuracy and comprehension, but there were also in all areas studies which found no significant differences. One major issue with these old studies is the display technology involved at the time, which for a fact resulted in more tiredness for the eyes, which obviously would have been an influencing factor. Similary the level of competence and experience of subjects in those days, when computer use was much less prevalent, is also something which needs to be considered. In my own view, changes in technology and usage question to some extent, but not completely, the relevance of these old studies.

Of the 10 studies listed :

• 5 found reading slower on screen as compared to paper, 3 found no differences
• 2 found comprehension worse when using a screen, 4 found no differences

The paper goes on to say though that since 1992 studies have been more aware of the need to preserve equivalence between the screen and paper versions of the testing task, and thus less reliance on partial performance indicators such as reading speed. However although now considered of less interest, differences in reading speed have been suggested even in studies using modern technology.

Modern studies pay more attention to other areas. For example there is the theory that using a computer involves more 'cognitive load' than reading from paper, with one study reporting "Although they found no significant difference in the comprehension scores or the overall workload scores for the two media, significantly more workload was reported on the effort dimension for the computer-based task. This finding is interesting, since it suggests that individuals need to put more effort into the computer task:"

Of the 20 post-1992 studies listed, if considered in light of a general 'which is better screen or paper' (speed, comprehnsion, accuracy etc.) half reported no difference, while 4 suggested benefits to the electronic method, and the same number , 4, suggested the opposite, that paper was more advantageous.

Beyond the effect on the individuals behaviour in pursuit of their own private or professional goals, one very important issue mentioned in this paper is the equivalence of paper based tests versus an electronic version. Given the amount of such electronic testing that is now performed, in all kinds of areas, and while many studies have found no differences, some have, and this means equivalence probably cannot always be simply assumed, but needs to be established. The paper concludes " total equivalence
is not possible to achieve, although developments in computer technology, more
sophisticated comparative measures and more positive user attitudes have resulted in a
continuing move towards achieving this goal."


Overall it seems the evidence is inconclusive, with a slight balance in favour of paper versus screen in certain simple areas, such as speed. However, balanced against this are many advantages of electronic formats, for example ease of retrieval and search mechanisms. So while the reading of one particular document might be better done from hard copy, the overall exploration of a volume of information is greatly facillitated by it being in electronic format.


More than just reading
Another important point I think is that studies cannot just focus on limited screen vs. paper tasks performed in isolation, but must consider as well our overall behaviour when it comes to the different media. This is raised in this interesting blog post  which references the point that 'materiality matters' made by an Anne Mangen, who agured in a journal article : "The reading experience includes manual activities and haptic perceptions (what the skin and muscles and joints register), and so as activities and perceptions of that kind are changed from one kind of reading experience to another because of the object, the reading experience, too, will change."

The point, which I consider a very valid one, is that reading on a screen means more than just considering it as electronic paper; the screen is part of a particular world in which we have certain general behaviours.

For example, I personally think that reading documents online is at risk of being contaminated by other online reading habits we have, habits which are adapted to dealing with a torrent of often un/semi-interesting or relevant information. We are so used to scanning webpages, search results, chain emails that I think we have developed mechanisms to skip through them, our hands contsantly on the mouse, scrolling incessantly. This approach is so different to the way we handle paper information, devoting our mind and body completely to it, with relatively little opportunity for distraction, and even physically reading in a different way - moving our eyes across it, and only turning the page occasionally, as opposed to our eyes staying fixed while we scroll the text past them.  Of course we can skim hard copies as well, but I think the brute physical stability of it results in a difference to how we handle webpages, and electronic documents. The point is not that electronic reading is necessarily of lower quality than of hard copy, but that we need to handle different types of information in different ways, and bad habits from one area might infect another. We use computers for many things, and so performing a task with them in reality is going to involve the general habits, attitudes and dispositions we have in dealing with electronic media, and this is something which might not be considered when testing individual tasks in isolation in a laboratory. If someone is used to skimming a newspaper every morning online, then this might affect how they read an important document later in the day when sitting at the same computer in the same environment. In contrast, reading a document as part of a study would be to do so in a completely different psychological setting, and might well be done differently.

Relevant to this is the result in the 'Computer- vs. paper-based tasks' paper above that people reported a higher workload for performing a task on a computer than on paper. Simply the fact of using a computer for the test had a psychological effect on the subjects, and this has to do with how we use computers in general, and not the particular task being tested. Hence only if such background behavioural information is also studied and understood, can it be effectively compensated for in any particular task test.

Beyond the medium being the message, the medium shapes us, and hence pinpointing the differences between media, is never going to be a simple task.