Here is my N=1 armchair hypothesis: If there really is a difference, I could imagine that the limited tactile experience is the key factor. Often times when I go for a walk with a podcast on I remember it much better because I associate parts of it with things I encountered along the way. Our finger tips are like magnifying glasses and produce a very rich (though semi-semiconscious) experience we associate parts of the book’s content with (especially the thinkness of both sides). With ebooks it’s reduced to visual experience, the tactile experience is pretty limited in variation and overall unchanging.
"When you read on paper you can sense with your fingers a pile of pages on the left growing, and shrinking on the right," said Mangen. "You have the tactile sense of progress, in addition to the visual ... [The differences for Kindle readers] might have something to do with the fact that the fixity of a text on paper, and this very gradual unfolding of paper as you progress through a story, is some kind of sensory offload, supporting the visual sense of progress when you're reading. Perhaps this somehow aids the reader, providing more fixity and solidity to the reader's sense of unfolding and progress of the text, and hence the story."
You could have at least glanced at the link before commenting.
This comment really confused me as I couldn't find the quote in the NYT until I read the other comments that the link had been changed from The Guardian. Nevertheless, this seems plausible.
I'd really like to know if they had that hypothesis going in and were testing it, or if they ran the test and then put in a plausible-sounding explanation for the results they found.
Well, I know(but don't have sources as of now) it works like that for memorizing stuff, as an example you probably remember where hundreds (or even thousands) of objects are placed within your home, or your office without thinking twice about it, you just "draw" a path to that you were looking for.
But is the absorbing in the article about remembering or understanding what's being read?
