TL;DR’ (Too Long; Didn’t Read)? Cognitive Patience as a Mode of Reading: Exploring Concentration and Perseverance

Abstract

Reading literature is often related to cognitive patience (i.e., the ability to read with focused and sustained attention and delay gratification, while refraining from multitasking or skimming over parts of the text). In this explorative, survey-based study, we investigate the relations between reading literature (especially longer texts) and concentration and perseverance, as well as the role of different modes of reading like skimming and skipping. Our measures include an adapted version of the Author Recognition Test (ART) and a new behavioral measure of cognitive patience, developed specifically for this study: the Unscrambling Sentence Test (UST). Our findings offer some preliminary support for the hypotheses that (1) Attentive reading of longer literary texts correlates with cognitive patience; (2) A preference for texts that require sustained attention correlates with cognitive patience; and (3) A preference to skim or skip text passages negatively predicts cognitive patience. We recommend further research to derive more insight in what modes of attention are employed in reading literature, beyond close or deep attention, and how readers modulate between them.