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Searching for an idea we’ve read in a book, we can find ourselves remembering it was, say, half way down on a left-hand page.
Searching for an idea we’ve read in a book, we can find ourselves remembering it was, say, half way down on a left-hand page.
One rather obvious feature of a printed book is that every time we go to it, it is exactly the same as before. Some readers feel that they can remember or find ideas by their location on the page, and there’s some research evidence for this.1
Readers can build a cognitive map of the text as a physical object in which headings, illustrations and other features act as landmarks. It’s why imageability matters. Strategic reading relies on the text remaining constant so that readers can retrace their path or locate ideas which at first seemed irrelevant but now need more attention.2
Websites can have this quality too, so long as the design and content is reasonably stable. But many researchers have compared reading on paper with reading on screen, and paper usually performs better.3 Some have explained this ‘screen inferiority effect’ as due to the difficulty readers have in constructing a cognitive map of the text. So careful structuring, chunking, and imageability are as important in digital documents as they are in paper ones.
Incidentally, we get the word topic from the Greek τοποι, which means place. When we were mainly an oral culture it was common to use imaginary places as memory aids4 – for example, you might think of a temple, and place ideas in niches inside it. Retrieval was a matter of walking through the building in the mind, and restoring the connection between place and fact.
1. Ernst Rothkopf (1971) Incidental memory for the location of information in text. Journal of Verbal Learning & Verbal Behavior 10: 608–13.
2. Robert Waller (1986). What electronic books will have to be better than. Information Design Journal 5.1: 72-75
3. Yiren Kong, Young Sik Seo, Ling Zhai. (2018) Comparison of reading performance on screen and on paper: A meta-analysis. Computers & Education, 123: 138-149.
4. Frances Yates (1966) The art of memory, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul