Reading Absorption

The processing demands reading imposes on both automatized and conscious attention are heavier than those made by movies, television, and cognate media. Reading absorption, which results from a fuller commitment of the attentional apparatus than movie- or television-absorption, is thus likely to do a better job than the other media of blocking out environmental distractions and changing focus of the reader's attention from the self to the book...

Another source of reading's superiority is that the novel can achieve things quite beyond the power of other media: "No film maker has ever brought the audience inside the mind ... of a character, something that even bad novelists are able to accomplish as a matter of routine" (Wolfe, 1973, p.64).

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