Social Media Interruptions and Personality Differences in Reading: Challenges to Coherence Monitoring

This study examined the effects of social media interruptions and individual differences in personality type on reading comprehension. Reading involves more than just decoding words; previous research suggests that overloading working memory can disrupt coherence monitoring and hinder the detection of inconsistencies in a text. In addition, studies have shown that introverts and extraverts may differ in how they process language and respond to interruptions, raising the central research question of this study: How do social media interruptions and personality differences affect the ability to detect inconsistencies in text during the reading process? To investigate this, the inconsistency paradigm from De Bruïne et al. (2021) was adapted in a 2 x 2 x 2 mixed design. Sixty Dutch-speaking university students read short stories sentence by sentence while their reading times were recorded. Each story contained either a consistent or inconsistent sentence, and social media interruptions...Show moreThis study examined the effects of social media interruptions and individual differences in personality type on reading comprehension. Reading involves more than just decoding words; previous research suggests that overloading working memory can disrupt coherence monitoring and hinder the detection of inconsistencies in a text. In addition, studies have shown that introverts and extraverts may differ in how they process language and respond to interruptions, raising the central research question of this study: How do social media interruptions and personality differences affect the ability to detect inconsistencies in text during the reading process? To investigate this, the inconsistency paradigm from De Bruïne et al. (2021) was adapted in a 2 x 2 x 2 mixed design. Sixty Dutch-speaking university students read short stories sentence by sentence while their reading times were recorded. Each story contained either a consistent or inconsistent sentence, and social media interruptions were presented at predefined points. Consistency and interruption were manipulated within subjects, while personality, assessed via the Quest-questionnaire, served as a between factor. A repeated measures ANOVA revealed a robust consistency effect at the critical sentence, indicating that participants were able to detect inconsistencies in the text. This suggests the presence of automatic rather than active coherence monitoring, as this effect was not moderated by the interruption. Social media interruptions had only a short-lived effect on reading times, and no clear differences were found between introverts and extraverts in their ability to detect inconsistencies. However, extraverts appeared to take slightly longer to return to baseline reading speed after an interruption. These findings suggest that while coherence monitoring is relatively resilient, subtle differences may exist in how individuals recover from distraction. Further research is needed to explore these mechanisms and their relevance for educational practice.Show less

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Social Media Interruptions and Personality Differences in Reading: Challenges to Coherence Monitoring