[1]
Television… is not the great information machine… …exposure to television… did not predict additional variance over and above… ability…
…when speculating about variables in people’s ecologies that could account for cognitive variability—in an attempt to supplement purely genetic accounts of mental ability…—researchers should find print exposure worth investigating, because such variables must have the requisite potency to perform their theoretical roles. A class of variables that might have such potency would be one that has long-term effects because of its repetitive or cumulative action. Schooling is obviously one such variable… …print exposure is another variable that accumulates over time into enormous individual differences. …these individual differences are associated to a strong degree with individual differences in general knowledge.
…individual differences in declarative knowledge bases—differences emphasized by many contemporary theories of developmental growth—appear to some extent to be experientially based, and the experience that has a particularly close link with these individual differences seems to be print exposure…
Print exposure… determines individual differences in knowledge bases, which in turn influence performance on a variety of basic information processing tasks…
…the more avid readers in our study—independent of their general abilities—knew more about how a carburetor worked, were more likely to know that Vitamin C was in citrus fruits, knew more about how lending rates affect car payments, were more likely to know who their U.S. Senators were, knew more about broiling food, were more likely to know what a stroke was, were more likely to know what a capital-intensive industry was, and were more likely to know who the United States was fighting with and who it was fighting against in World War II.
Print exposure accounted for a sizable portion of variance in measures of general knowledge, even after variance associated with general cognitive ability was partialed out. There does appear to be differential exposure to information, primarily through the medium of reading, and this differential exposure is predictive over and above general cognitive ability. …print exposure… was a more potent predictor than the ability measures. When entered after the print exposure composite, the… cognitive ability measures… accounted for an additional 5.1% of the variance in the knowledge composite scores, considerably less than the 37.1% of the variance accounted for by the print exposure…
…print exposure influences cognitive efficiency.[2]
- “Wonder Words… Wisdom, Skill & Virtue.” LifeSuccessCoaching, 30 June 2011, lifesuccesscoaching.net/2011/06/30/wonder-words-wisdom-skill-virtue/. Accessed 20 Nov. 2016.
- Stanovich, Keith E., and Anne E. Cunningham. “Where Does Knowledge Come From? Specific Associations between Print Exposure and Information Acquisition.” Journal of Educational Psychology 85.2 (1993): 211-29.