An investigation into disfluency effects: Depth of learning and affective outcomes
Elizabeth Whitehouse · 2011
Fluency is the concept of how easily information is processed. How fluent stimuli are can effect many real world outcomes, including increased ratings of truth, perceptions of the intelligence of an author, the potential enjoyment of stimuli, as well as increasing one’s feeling of familiarity. When stimuli are disfluent, or processed with cognitive difficulty, learning outcomes are superior to when stimuli is presented in a fluent manner. When participants were presented with learning material in Comic Sans or Bodini, they were able to recall more answers than participants who had the material presented in Arial (Diemand-Yauman, Oppenheimer & Vaughn, 2011). Experiment 1 used the same learning paradigm as Diemand-Yauman et al. (2011) to test four new fonts, with the aim to correct for confounds in the original study. The results demonstrated that participants learned the information best when presented in Corbel or Haettenschweiler, whereas they did not learn the information as well when presented in the Corbel Blur and RaNDoM conditions. In Experiment 2, participants read three good and three average essays, which were followed by two affect measures, and measures of recognition, recall and transfer memory. Results revealed that participants liked reading essays that were presented in Corbel significantly more than when they were presented in Haettenschweiler or Random fonts. Essays presented in Corbel received higher ‘grades’ than essays presented in the two disfluent fonts. In regards to learning outcomes, participants answered more questions correctly for the essays presented in Corbel, compared to those in Haettenschweiler and Random conditions. Additionally, results revealed that performance on the recall learning measure were higher when the essays were ‘average’ compared to when they were ‘good.’ The results contradict the findings of Diemand- Yauman et al. (2011). This thesis therefore highlights the need for further validation to determine the true nature of the effect, and the conditions for optimising performance.