Study suggests that people are less focused when reading on Kindle than when reading a paperback

From the NYT:

A team of researchers led by Anne Mangen at the University of Stavanger in Norway and Jean-Luc Velay at Aix-Marseille Université in France divided 50 graduate students — with equivalent reading habits and experience with tablets — into two groups and had them read the same short story by Elizabeth George (in French translation). One group read the story in paperback, the other on an Amazon Kindle DX. All the while, researchers measured the students’ reading time and their “emotional response” — using a standard psychology scale — to the text. Afterward, they were tested extensively on different aspects of the story. 

In most respects, there was no significant difference between the Kindle readers and the paper readers: the emotional measures were roughly the same, and both groups of readers responded almost equally to questions dealing with the setting of the story, the characters and other plot details. But, the Kindle readers scored significantly lower on questions about when events in the story occurred. They also performed almost twice as poorly when asked to arrange 14 plot points in the correct sequence.

“It’s interesting to us that the differences were both related to time and temporality — why is that?” said Ms. Mangen, who presented her team’s study last month at a conference in Turin, Italy.  

Here is a diagram with the results. The Kindle group underperforms the paperback group on any dimension. Since n = 50, some of the differences may be not statistically significant and the study definitely needs replication on larger groups and with different types of screen devices.