Paper or pixel? Science settles divisive debate over best way to read — real books or screens

Here’s the word on the best medium for reading

A new study may have settled the contentious debate over the efficacy of digital readers versus hard copy books by observing the brain processes behind reading for each format.

The findings, published in the journal PLOS ONE, revealed that the brain may process and connect story details more efficiently by reading content printed on a page, whereas an e-reader presents letters and pictures on a static screen, thus providing fewer physical cues to help the reader grasp a story.

Researchers at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Tokyo used Japanese comic books, called manga, for their investigation of how the brain builds a “story schema,” a mental framework that organizes characters, timelines and relationships described in a narrative.

The results suggested that printed works provide tactile and spatial cues, such as the thickness of or placement of events on a page, that may better help readers mentally map a story than digital tablets can.

The research was conducted in partnership with COAMIX INC., a Japanese publisher of manga whose most popular titles include “Record of Ragnarok” and “Wakako Sake.”

Kuniyoshi L. Sakai, a professor at the University of Tokyo’s Department of Basic Science, told PsyPost in a statement that the team was “surprised” by the results.

Researchers enlisted 25 Japanese college students, all of whom were right-handed — a parameter that would likely reduce variability in brain organization, according to the American Academy of Neurology.

Since digital devices would interfere with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) — the gold standard for observing brain activity — the participants were asked to enter the fMRI scanner just after reading the first half of a manga story, either with a physical book or on a screen. Upon entering the machine, participants then read the second half of the story through specialized goggles.

At the end of the experiment, readers took a quiz concerning the plot — some that focused on just the first half of the story, and others that required integration of the first and second parts.

Both groups earned high marks for accuracy and reading comprehension overall, but those who read from a tablet for the first half of the assigned comic took longer to answer the more complex questions that required combining information from different parts of the narrative. 

“We found that both left and right hemispheres, which work during reading mostly for proper linguistic functions and supportive roles, respectively, are less engaged when manga contents are well understood through reading on paper, compared with digital reading,” Sakai told PsyPost. “This neuroscientific result is the first to show such an immediate effect of reading on paper, which would eventually change your brain.”

Researchers also found that participants who read real manga showed lower brain activity in the areas involved in language processing and narrative integration, which they interpreted as a sign that the brain is performing a task more efficiently. On the other hand, tablet readers showed more activity in those areas, as well as the areas that help support difficult cognitive tasks and spatial processing.

This indicates that device users needed more brain power to later reconstruct the story during the final test, leading to the conclusion that paper readers had built a stronger “schema” in their minds during the initial reading.

Despite the obvious differences between conventional and picture books, Sakai defended the decision to use manga precisely for its use of images to tell a story, which facilitates comprehension across all reading levels.

“The same results would be obtained for reading a novel or other conventional texts, because story lines and contextual flow are basically the same among them,” Sakai said.

Though research on the effects of digital reading formats is ongoing, it’s not the first study to pit tablets against printed books. A 2019 study in the journal Pediatrics also found that parents and children who read from real books together — allowing them to grasp and hold the media — bonded better than with e-readers.

“The print book is really the gold standard in eliciting positive interactions between parents and their children,” said lead researcher, University of Michigan professor Dr. Tiffany Munzer, at the time.