Chapter 13 Further Reading: Memory, Attention, and the Cognitive Cost of Scrolling

Foundational Cognitive Science

1. Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman's synthesis of behavioral economics and cognitive psychology, accessible to a general audience without sacrificing scientific rigor. The System 1 / System 2 framework developed here is the foundational conceptual tool for understanding why social media preferentially engages automatic rather than deliberate processing. Essential reading for anyone studying the cognitive dimensions of media use.

2. Sweller, J. (1988). Cognitive load during problem solving: Effects on learning. Cognitive Science, 12(2), 257–285. The foundational paper of cognitive load theory, establishing the relationship between working memory capacity, information complexity, and learning effectiveness. Sweller's framework is directly applicable to the analysis of social media feeds as high-extraneous-load information environments. The paper is technical but accessible to students with some background in cognitive psychology.

3. Miller, G. A. (1956). The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review, 63(2), 81–97. The classic paper establishing working memory's limited capacity. Miller's "magical number seven" has been refined and qualified in subsequent research (the number of chunks that can be held is somewhat smaller than seven for complex information), but the basic finding — that working memory is severely capacity-limited — remains the cornerstone of cognitive load theory and is essential context for understanding information overload on social media.

Attention and Interruption Research

4. Mark, G. (2023). Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity. Hanover Square Press. Gloria Mark's popular synthesis of twenty years of interruption and attention research, written for a general audience. The book combines the research findings described in this chapter with practical guidance for managing attention in notification-rich environments. More accessible than her academic publications and directly applicable to students' and workers' daily lives.

5. Mark, G., Gudith, D., & Klocke, U. (2008). The cost of interrupted work: More speed and stress. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 107–110. The key paper establishing the cost of interrupted work in terms of performance speed, accuracy, and perceived stress. The finding that interrupted workers work faster but make more errors and experience more stress is both counterintuitive and practically important. Essential reading for understanding why the advice to "just push through interruptions" does not work.

6. Leroy, S. (2009). Why is it so hard to do my work? The challenge of attention residue when switching between work tasks. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 109(2), 168–181. The paper introducing the attention residue concept. Leroy's research demonstrates that switching tasks before fully completing the prior task leaves residual cognitive activation that impairs performance on the subsequent task. The framework is directly applicable to the experience of transitioning from social media to academic or professional work.

7. Ward, A. F., Duke, K., Gneezy, A., & Bos, M. W. (2017). Brain drain: The mere presence of one's own smartphone reduces available cognitive capacity. Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, 2(2), 140–154. The paper establishing the brain drain effect: the presence of a smartphone on the desk reduces cognitive capacity even when the phone is not being used. The experimental design, findings, and proposed mechanism are carefully described. The study has attracted considerable attention both in academic and popular media and has been partially replicated in subsequent research.

Media Multitasking Research

8. Ophir, E., Nass, C., & Wagner, A. D. (2009). Cognitive control in media multitaskers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(37), 15583–15587. The landmark Stanford study finding that heavy media multitaskers perform worse on attention and cognitive control tasks than light multitaskers. The paper's experimental design, participant recruitment, and finding have been extensively discussed and partially replicated. Essential reading for anyone studying the cognitive effects of media multitasking.

9. Uncapher, M. R., Thieu, M. K., & Wagner, A. D. (2016). Media multitasking and memory: Differences in working memory and long-term memory. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 23(2), 483–490. Extension of the Ophir et al. work specifically examining memory outcomes in heavy vs. light media multitaskers. Finds that heavy media multitaskers show worse working memory performance and worse long-term memory for information encountered in distraction-rich contexts. Directly relevant to the memory formation consequences of media multitasking described in this chapter.

10. Rosen, L. D., Carrier, L. M., & Cheever, N. A. (2013). Facebook and texting made me do it: Media-induced task-switching while studying. Computers in Human Behavior, 29(3), 948–958. Study of social media and texting use during studying, finding that students who used social media or texted during a fifteen-minute observation period retained significantly less information from a video lecture than those who studied without technological distraction. The study translates the laboratory findings into the applied educational context.

Memory and the Google Effect

11. Sparrow, B., Liu, J., & Wegner, D. M. (2011). Google effects on memory: Cognitive consequences of having information at our fingertips. Science, 333(6043), 776–778. The foundational "Google effect" paper, reporting four experiments demonstrating that knowing information will be digitally accessible reduces the likelihood of encoding it into memory, while increasing memory for how to access it. The paper is elegant in its experimental design and its connections to transactive memory theory. Essential reading for the memory-outsourcing dimension of digital technology use.

12. Wegner, D. M., Giuliano, T., & Hertel, P. T. (1985). Cognitive interdependence in close relationships. In W. J. Ickes (Ed.), Compatible and incompatible relationships (pp. 253–276). Springer. The original formulation of transactive memory theory in the context of close relationships. Wegner and colleagues show how couples and other intimate pairs distribute memory storage across their social unit, with each member specializing in different domains of information. This paper provides the theoretical background for the Google effect's extension of transactive memory to digital systems.

Reading, Attention, and the Internet

13. Carr, N. (2010). The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. W. W. Norton & Company. The influential popular science book arguing that the internet's architecture promotes shallow, rapid, non-linear information processing at the expense of the sustained, linear deep reading that print culture cultivated over centuries. Carr draws on neuroscience and cognitive psychology to support his argument. The book is engaging and well-written; its specific empirical claims are more contested than its rhetorical confidence suggests, and students should read it critically alongside the academic literature.

14. Wolf, M. (2018). Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World. Harper. Cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf's examination of how reading and the reading brain are shaped by the medium in which reading occurs, and how digital environments may be changing the reading brain in ways that affect comprehension, empathy, and critical thinking. Wolf is more cautious than Carr in her empirical claims but similarly concerned about the long-term effects of digital reading habits on deep literacy.

15. Birkerts, S. (1994). The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. Faber and Faber. A literary critic's meditation on the changes in reading culture wrought by electronic media. Written before the internet was fully developed, Birkerts's concerns about attention, depth, and the cultural role of sustained reading now read as prescient. The book provides important humanistic context for the more empirical arguments of Carr and Wolf.

Attention Economy and Design Ethics

16. Simon, H. A. (1971). Designing organizations for an information-rich world. In M. Greenberger (Ed.), Computers, Communication, and the Public Interest (pp. 37–72). Johns Hopkins Press. The foundational text of the attention economy concept, in which Herbert Simon identifies that information abundance creates attention scarcity and anticipates the competition for human attention that would characterize the digital economy. Students who engage with the primary source will find Simon's analysis remarkably prescient and theoretically rigorous.

17. Newport, C. (2016). Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. Grand Central Publishing. Computer science professor Cal Newport's argument for the value of deep, focused cognitive work and the practices that support it, in a world designed to fragment attention. Newport's analysis of what distraction costs knowledge workers, and his practical framework for cultivating focused work, is directly applicable to the cognitive cost research described in this chapter. One of the most practically useful books in the digital attention space.

Educational Applications

18. Bowman, L. L., Levine, L. E., Waite, B. M., & Gendron, M. (2010). Can students really multitask? An experimental study of instant messaging while reading. Computers & Education, 54(4), 927–931. Experimental study finding that college students who instant messaged during a lecture took longer to read assigned passages and had lower reading comprehension scores. A useful early study connecting media multitasking research to educational settings.

19. Sana, F., Weston, T., & Cepeda, N. J. (2013). Laptop multitasking hinders classroom learning for both users and nearby peers. Computers & Education, 62, 24–31. Finding that students who multitasked on laptops during lectures not only performed worse themselves but also impaired learning in nearby students who could see their screens. The peer-effect finding has significant implications for classroom technology policy.

20. Wilmer, H. H., Sherman, L. E., & Chein, J. M. (2017). Smartphones and cognition: A review of research exploring the links between mobile technology habits and cognitive functioning. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 605. A comprehensive review of research on smartphones and cognition covering attention, working memory, decision-making, and metacognition. Provides a useful synthesis of the research landscape and identifies areas of consensus and ongoing debate. Accessible to students with some psychology background and recommended as a starting point for anyone researching this area.