The study used a pen and touchscreen for the writing case, so this comment is a tangent. But there's a lot to be said for the memory-palace effect of physically placing words in a specific place on a specific piece of paper in a physical notebook. I might not perfectly remember what I wrote, but I absolutely remember where I wrote it. That's lost with digital notes.

>I might not perfectly remember what I wrote, but I absolutely remember where I wrote it. That's lost with digital notes.

Digital notes are searchable, so I'd say this is a very fair trade-off. If all my notes are .txt files in a "notes" directory, even if I don't recall which file I wrote my pizza order from last week in, I can grep them all for keywords like "pizza" to find it immediately. (I can also manage the notes with SyncThing to have them on multiple PCs/phones at once)

I wonder if this might be a situation where the spatial navigation concepts found in the original macOS would be beneficial. It leveraged the user’s spatial and muscle memory to enable quick navigation of the filesystem by giving each directory its own dedicated window with a user-defined size and screen location. The effect is very much like navigating a physical space, with each file and folder having a spatial “path” that’s effortlessly encoded in memory.

While this may not scale well to the complexity of modern filesystems, it might work well for a stylus-based digital notetaking device.

Nothing as fanciful as a 'memory palace'.

It's more that with a physical note you aren't giving yourself permission to forget, because you can't instantly repo the information. Just like taking a photograph of a beautiful moment is detrimental to creating a memory of said moment.

Mostly use obsidian, but the file and folder hierarchy with outlines feels memory palace like and on top of that the linkage and tag graphs. There is structure beyond a note floating by itself.