Don’t Throw Away Your Notebook: Effects of Task Difficulty and Presentation Medium on Memory Performance

Abstract

People are increasingly reliant on various electrical devices for learning and memory, yet the implications and consequences of this dependence remain poorly understood. The present study aimed to investigate how learning through electrical media impacts recall under varying task difficulties. During this study, participants encoded information related to daily life situations (low difficulty), academic conceptual knowledge (middle difficulty), or associative word pairs (high difficulty), presented on smartphones, computers, or paper. At test, they recalled the omitted content based on the provided cue information. A significant screen-inferiority effect was observed for both computers and smartphones. However, the impairment related to computers disappeared in the retrieval of daily life situations and academic conceptual knowledge, whereas the impairment associated with smartphones was consistently present across all tasks. These results suggest that memory performance is modulated by the interaction between the presentation medium and the specific demands of the task, highlighting a more pronounced screen-inferiority memory effect when the media restrict the depth of processing or when the memory tasks pose greater external challenges. A deeper understanding of these factors can guide the optimization of electrical devices to enhance human memory abilities and functions.

Keywords

• memory
• task difficulty
• presentation medium
• screen-inferiority effect
• smartphone
• electrical devices