Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When reading a text, readers not only recognise words and retrieve their meanings as they construct a mental representation of the text, but they also process the physical location of the text, including the position of key information. This study investigates how different presentation formats (prints vs. digital) influence the ability to locate information in texts, and if this is influenced by different types of text, and age. Generalized Linear Mixed Models (GLMM; Baayen, 2008) starting with maximal random effects structure (Barr et al., 2013) are employed for analysis. Results indicate that participants in the print condition outperformed their peers in the digital condition on the measure of location of information, but no difference was found between different text types. Additionally, results suggest that spatial working memory is positively related to the ability to locate information in texts.