Exploring The Effect Factors:the Brain Prefer Printed Book, Or E-book?

With the rising of the electronic media, and the promotion of electronic text, the e-books are gradually into people's daily lives. E-books are easy to store, portable, environmental protection and have many other advantages. Although e-books have a large market share, the printed book is still the first choice for most people to do long time reading and use to study now.In this era of media alternately, with respect to the printed books, what are the differences in learning outcomes and learning attitude for learners who use e-books? If there are differences, what kind of the factors that affect those learning outcomes? And what kind of theory or hypothesis can explain the effect process? What kind of measures can be adopted for the learners to minimize the differences caused by the using of different media to read? Those issues will all be revealed in our study.Through the literature review of the previous studies, we find that when doing the long time reading, there are different in reading speed, the memorizing and understanding of the contents, the psychological desire to do continue reading, as well as physiologically visual fatigue, for learners using printed books vs e-books. In order to reveal the factors that result in the different reading performance caused by the different reading conditions, we find three hypotheses. They are cueing map hypothesis, the long-term reading experience, and cognitive load theory. We conduct three experiments to verify the three hypotheses, and to analyze the specific impact process.Experiment 1 is a single factor between subjects experiment with three levels. The aim is to validate cueing map hypothesis, which is whether it is due to the context cues and marks that make the print books'reading performance better than e-books. By setting three different cueing levels, which called P-book, iReader and Word, the experiment task is to let subjects to read from the cover to the end of chapter 1 in a book about economic, total 58 pages. After that, reading quiz is followed. The result shows that:the learners in P-book group is the highest on transfer test and continue reading tendency; but the Word group is the best on retention test and has the highest in reading mental effort, subjective difficulty about reading contents, testing mental effort, cognitive load, and visual fatigue; when estimating the key information's page, the Word group shows the largest negative value of error pages and absolute value of error pages, and the least number of positive pages. Because there are differences on daily electronic reading time and task finishing time between the three reading conditions. So when taking the daily electronic reading time as covariant, we find that the transfer test is not significant, but the retention test is the same as before. When take the task finishing time as covariant, we find that the transfer test and retention test are significant on the edge.Experiment 2 is a 2 (long-term reading experience:long-term printed text reading, long-term electronic text reading) ×2 (reading condition:printed books, e-books) between subjects design. The participants take the same task as experiment 1. The results show that:the main effect of the reading condition is significant, the printed books group is higher on transfer test and continue reading tendency than e-books group, but scores on testing mental effort, subjective difficulty about testing contents, cognitive load, and visual fatigue are lower than e-books group, and scores on negative value of error pages and absolute value of error pages are also less than e-books group. The main effect of long-term reading experience is significant. The long-term electronic text reading group is higher than long-term printed text reading group on retention test and transfer test, but lower than long-term printed text reading group on reading mental effort, testing mental effort, cognitive load, negative value of error pages and the word count of the test answers. There are also some interactions. On the e-books reading condition, the long-term electronic text reading group is better on retention test, higher on negative value of error pages, and less on number of positive pages. On the print books reading condition, the long-term printed text reading group has higher cueing score. For the long-term printed text reading group, learners in the print books reading condition get higher retention score and cueing score. For the long-term electronic text reading group, learners in the e-books reading condition get higher retention score and more negative value of error pages.Experiment 3 is using a 2 (interference task:yes, no) × 2 (reading conditions: printed books, e-books) between subjects design. The participant do the same task as experiment 1, but for the subjects who in interference task condition, there will have a speech playing mathematic subtraction problems while reading, and the learners have to speak out the answers too. The answers and reaction time are also recorded. The result shows that:the main effect of the reading conditions is significant, the printed books group is higher on transfer test and get more on number of positive pages than e-books group, but scores on testing mental effort, subjective difficulty about testing contents, cognitive load, and visual fatigue are lower than e-books group, and scores on negative value of error pages and absolute value of error pages are also less than e-books group. The main effect of interference task is significant. The no interference task group is higher than interference task group on retention test, transfer test, and continue reading tendency, but lower than interference task group on subjective difficulty about reading contents and testing mental effort. There are also some interactions. On the no interference task reading condition, the e-books reading group is better on retention test, higher on reading mental effort and cognitive load, but lower on continue reading tendency. On the e-books reading condition, the no interference task group is better on retention test and higher on reading mental effort. On the printed books reading condition, the no interference task group is also higher on continue reading tendency. Because the interference task conditions have differences on daily electronic screen using time. So when take the daily electronic screen using time as covariant, we find that the main effect of interference task is missing.In conclusions, we know that:(1) the cueing maps hypothesis is correct. During long time reading, the reading condition affects learners'deep reading. With respect to e-books, printed books due to the wealth of information cues, make learners easier to understand and the transfer the new knowledge. (2)The long-term experience hypothesis is correct. The readers'long-term reading experience can affect the reading results. For the people who have long-term paper text reading experience, are more suitable to read books in print, which will have better memorizing results about new knowledge. For the people who have long-term electronic text reading experience, are more suitable to read books in electronic media, and will have better memorizing results about new knowledge. (3)The cognitive load theory is right. The e-books reading condition has higher cognitive load than printed books reading condition, and will damage the deep understanding of the new knowledge. (4) When doing the long time reading, the learners'shallow memories about the knowledge are more easily be influenced by the reading environment and learners'reading habits. (5) When doing the long time reading, the cognitive load of the learning process and the learners'shallow memories about the knowledge have an inverted V-shaped relationship. Before reaching the critical value, the greater the cognitive load, the better the shallow memorizing effect; but once exceeds the critical value, the greater cognitive load, the worse the shallow memorizing effect. (6) When doing the long time reading, the reading conditions and long-term reading experience both impact the readers' mentality and emotion. In the printed books reading environment, the learners have lower degree of fatigue visual, are more willing to do continue reading, and showing a confident, positive reading attitude. But for the electronic reading environment and long-term e-reading experience, both will make the learners more prone to have visual fatigue, do not want to keep reading, and reflecting a conservative reading mentality. (7) When doing the long time reading, reading on the electronic environment are more susceptible to the interference from the external environment, and have a higher requirements to the external environment. (8) For the long-term electronic media users, the daily use of electronic screens and electronic reading habits can reduce or even eliminate the different reading results, which caused by the use of different media and different outside reading environment.