2026 Theses Doctoral

Depth-of-Processing and Attentional Disengagement During Reading in Print and Digital Media: An Electrophysiological Investigation

Smith, Paul J.

The prevalence of digital media and devices both at home and in classrooms has engendered interest in understanding the effect of reading in this medium as compared to traditional print texts, particularly for school-aged readers. The results of examining reading in these two mediums have been mixed, though a relative print advantage for comprehension accuracy has been detected especially for reading expository texts and under time pressure. One possibility is that reading in these formats differs with respect to the stability of attentional engagement during text comprehension. Electrophysiological measures provide an opportunity to evaluate how strongly textual context constrains interpretation as reading unfolds across media.

High-density EEG data were collected from a sample of middle school participants during and subsequent to reading passages in digital and print media. A semantic relatedness judgment task allowed for application of an N400 analysis to probe words at three levels of relatedness to the text passage, including an intermediate condition designed to test the strength of contextual constraint. Participants showed unique N400 responses within each medium: responses to words of intermediate relatedness patterned with related words in the print medium, but with unrelated words in the digital medium, indicating weaker contextual constraint during digital reading.

In addition to the ERP analysis, oscillatory activity in the theta, alpha, and beta frequency bands was measured as an indicator of attentional engagement during reading across media. Spectral similarity and microstate analyses were also conducted to assess indices of moment-to-moment shifts toward internally directed processing. Higher alpha and theta power, increased theta/beta ratios, greater spectral similarity to resting activity, and higher indices of internally-directed cognition were all observed for digital text reading. Together, these converging measures suggest that differences between digital and print reading arise from variation in attentional stability during comprehension, which alters how strongly readers can use contextual information to interpret incoming words.