Taking notes: paper beats tablet and cell phone
Sometimes digital tools aren't all that useful: Taking notes is faster on good old-fashioned paper than with an app on a tablet or smartphone. That's the finding of a study conducted by the University of Tokyo and the NTT Data Institute of Management Consulting.
According to the study, volunteers were 25 percent faster in the experiment when they wrote down notes about appointments on paper using a pen. They were also better able to remember what they had written down.
Superior classic
In the experiment, 48 volunteers aged 18 to 29 read a conversation between characters about their plans for the next few months. They were then asked to enter the corresponding schedule in a diary, either in a very modern app or in an old-fashioned paper model. Subjects with a paper diary took an average of around eleven minutes to make notes, while those with an app on a tablet took 14 minutes and those with a smartphone app as much as 16 minutes - regardless of what the subjects themselves preferred in their daily lives.
The paper users not only finished their notes faster than the app users. They were also better able to remember simple details of the schedule in a multiple-choice test one hour later. In a functional MRI performed during the test, they also showed significantly more brain activity, including in the hippocampus and areas related to language. This shows that "it makes more sense to use paper notebooks for information we need to learn or memorize," said Kuniyoshi L. Sakai, a neuroscientist at the University of Tokyo.
Visualize more individually
The researchers blame the fact that people remember notes better on classic paper than in modern apps on the fact that paper ultimately offers more and more individual options. "Digital tools have uniform scrolling up and down and standardized arrangements of text and image size," Sakai explains. Paper, on the other hand, allows for things like folded corners or irregular type. So users can better visualize information - for example, where they've scribbled something in the margin or where there's an image on a page. (pte)
