阅读电子书 可能会令记忆能力变弱？！（中英双语）

Do E-Books Make It Harder to Remember What You Just Read?

【摘要】

Specialists suggested reading E-book on mobile and tablet might impair memory. It might be that physical books are best when you want to study complex ideas and concepts that you wish to integrate deeply into your memory.

心理学家称，使用手机、平板电脑等手持设备阅读电子书，可能会削弱人脑的记忆能力。专家建议，读电子书还是读纸质书，有一条重要准则：当你想认真学习的时候，记得用纸质书。

--------（译文是将原文翻译后整合的，所以不是逐句翻译哟，原文来自《TIME》杂志）----------

 I received a Kindle for my birthday, and enjoying “light reading,”（轻阅读） in addition to the dense science I read for work, I immediately loaded it with mysteries by my favorite authors. But I soon found that I had difficulty recalling the names of characters from chapter to chapter. At first, I attributed the lapses to a scary reality of getting older — but then I discovered that I didn’t have this problem when I read paperbacks.

 When I discussed my quirky recall with friends and colleagues, I found out I wasn’t the only one who suffered from “e-book moments.” Online, I discovered that Google’s Larry Page himself had concerns about research showing that on-screen reading is measurably slower than reading on paper.

 Kate Garland, a lecturer in psychology at the University of Leicester in England, is one of the few scientists who has studied this question and reviewed the data. She found that when the exact same material is presented in both media, there is no measurable difference in student performance.

However, there are some subtle distinctions that favor print, which may matter in the long run. In one study involving psychology students, the medium did seem to matter. “We bombarded poor psychology students with economics that they didn’t know,” she says. Two differences emerged. First, more repetition was required with computer reading to impart the same information.

Second, the book readers seemed to digest the material more fully. Garland explains that when you recall something, you either “know” it and it just “comes to you” — without necessarily consciously recalling the context in which you learned it — or you “remember” it by cuing yourself about that context and then arriving at the answer. “Knowing” is better because you can recall the important facts faster and seemingly effortlessly.

“What we found was that people on paper started to ‘know’ the material more quickly over the passage of time,” says Garland. “It took longer and [required] more repeated testing to get into that knowing state [with the computer reading, but] eventually the people who did it on the computer caught up with the people who [were reading] on paper.”

Context and landmarks may actually be important to going from “remembering” to “knowing.” The more associations a particular memory can trigger, the more easily it tends to be recalled. Consequently, seemingly irrelevant factors like remembering whether you read something at the top or the bottom of page — or whether it was on the right or left hand side of a two-page spread or near a graphic — can help cement material in mind.

神经科学研究者玛雅·萨拉维兹对在手机、平板电脑上的阅读发出质疑，指出人们通过手持设备阅读电子书，可能会令记忆能力变弱。

玛雅发现，在平板电脑上阅读文章，每隔一两个章节就会轻易地忘掉故事角色的名字，而在纸质书报上的阅读则没有这种困扰。接着她翻阅了一些资料，了解到原来谷歌的创始人拉里·佩奇也曾对屏幕阅读比纸质阅读速度明显较慢的现象表示担忧。

日本东京第三北品川医院的筑山节院长曾表示，近年来25岁―35岁的年轻人患健忘症的越来越多，患者中多数是从小玩电子游戏、电脑、移动电话等科技产品的年轻一代。

凯特·伽尔兰德是英国莱斯特大学的一名心理学讲师，她发现，在电子书上和在纸张上阅读完全相同的材料，并没有特别明显的差别。但是，对于长期阅读而言，微妙的差别出现了。伽尔兰德做了一个实验，将她的心理学学生分成两部分去阅读一段他们不熟悉的经济学材料，一部分学生通过手持设备阅读，另一部分则阅读纸质版本的材料。实验结果显示出两个微小差异：

第一，使用电子书阅读的学生为了理解信息，往往需要多次重复阅读某些段落。而阅读纸质书的学生则较少出现这种重复阅读。

第二，纸质书的读者对内容理解得更透彻。

伽尔兰德介绍，当你要回忆起某件事，有两种可能的方法，一是你仅仅“记得”这件事，还需要一系列的联想去“懂得”事情，二是你已经完全透彻地“懂得”这件事。显然，后者有更大优势。她补充道：“阅读纸质书的人们对内容‘懂’得更快，阅读电子书的人则需要更长的时间和更多的重复阅读才能达到‘懂得’的境界。”

E-books, however, provide fewer spatial landmarks than print, especially pared-down versions like the early Kindles, which simply scroll through text and don’t even show page numbers, just the percentage already read. In a sense, the page is infinite and limitless, which can be dizzying. Printed books on the other hand, give us a physical reference point, and part of our recall includes how far along in the book we are, something that’s more challenging to assess on an e-book.

Jakob Nielsen, a Web “usability” expert and principal of the Nielsen Norman Group, believes e-reading does lead to a different type of recall. “I really do think we remember less” from e-books, he says. “This is not something I have formally measured, but just based on both studies we’ve done looking at reading behavior on tablets and books and reading from regular computers.”

He says that studies show that smaller screens also make material less memorable. “The bigger the screen, the more people can remember and the smaller, the less they can remember,” he says. “The most dramatic example is reading from mobile phones. [You] lose almost all context.”

Searching by typing or scrolling back is also more distracting than simply turning back pages to return to an important point, he notes. “Human short-term memory is extremely volatile and weak,” says Nielsen. “That’s why there’s a huge benefit from being able to glance [across a page or two] and see [everything] simultaneously. Even though the eye can only see one thing at a time, it moves so fast that for all practical purposes, it can see [the pages] and can interrelate the material and understand it more.”

Flipping through pages is also less mentally taxing. “The more you have to expend your minimal brain power to divert it into these other tasks [like search, the less it is] available for learning.”

This doesn’t mean that there isn’t a place for e-text books or computerized courseware, however. Neither Nielsen nor Garland is opposed to using new media for teaching. In fact, both believe that there are many situations in which they can offer real advantages. However, different media have different strengths — and it may be that physical books are best when you want to study complex ideas and concepts that you wish to integrate deeply into your memory. More studies will likely show what material is best suited for learning in a digital format, and what type of lessons best remain in traditional textbooks.

But someone — perhaps the publishing industry? — is going to have to take the initiative and fund them.

互联网可用性专家雅各布·尼尔森对此也发表了看法。他的研究结果指出，用小屏幕的手持设备阅读电子书，会让读过的内容更难记起来，比如手机用户就深受其害，各种电子书看过就忘。

人们在进化过程中被塑造成对空间有强烈的敏感性，因此上下文关系和标志性事物都有助于读者从“记得”知识迈向“懂得”知识。文段是靠近页眉还是靠近页脚，是在左边书页还是在右边书页，旁边是不是有幅图画，这些看似无关的元素其实对阅读记忆有很大帮助。

然而，电子书并没有空间标志以供参考，尤其是那些以滚动页面为呈现方式的电子书，它们从来不告诉你页码，只会显示你所读过的内容占全书的百分比。如此一页即一书，读起来实在令人头大。

电子书的另一个弱点是轻易地让读者分心，尤其是搜索、回卷和跳页阅读等各种麻烦操作。更遑论设备上的各种游戏软件了。

告诉大家这些，并非是让大家抛弃电子书，重新投入纸质书的怀抱。恰恰相反，尼尔森和伽尔兰德两位专家都认为，不同的书籍载体适用于不同的场合。对于读电子书还是读纸质书，专家提供一条重要准则：当你想认真学习的时候，记得用纸质书。

2013-07-19

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