Prior research suggests that reducing font clarity can cause people to consider printed information more carefully. The most famous demonstration showed that participants were more likely to solve counterintuitive math problems when they were printed in hard-to-read font. However, after pooling data from that experiment with 16 attempts to replicate it, we find no effect on solution rates. We examine potential moderating variables, including cognitive ability, presentation format, and experimental setting, but we find no evidence of a disfluent font benefit under any conditions. More generally, though disfluent fonts slightly increase response times, we find little evidence that they activate analytic reasoning.
Download full-text PDF |
Source |
|---|---|
| http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xge0000049 | DOI Listing |
Publication Analysis
Top Keywords
Similar Publications
Font disfluency and reading performance in children: An event-related potential study.
Brain Cogn
July 2023
Cognitive Ageing and Impairment Neurosciences Laboratory, Behaviour, Brain and Body Research Centre, UniSA: Justice and Society, University of South Australia, Adelaide, SA 5000, Australia; School of Psychology, University of Adelaide, SA 5005, Australia. Electronic address:
Expert adult readers process fluent and disfluent fonts differently, at both early perceptual and late higher-order processing stages. This finding has been interpreted as reflecting the more difficult to read disfluent fonts requiring greater neural resources. We aimed to investigate whether neural activity is affected by font disfluency in pre-adolescent readers, and to determine if neural responses are related to reading performance.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRecognition of Studied Words in Perceptual Disfluent Sans Forgetica Font.
Vision (Basel)
August 2022
Geffen Academy at University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90024, USA.
The new Sans Forgetica (SF) typeface creates perceptual disfluency by breaking up parts of letters vertically, horizontally, or diagonally, thereby fragmentizing them. While patterns of fragmentization are consistent for each unique letter, they are not uniform across letters. With Gestalt principles such as good continuation and perceptual completion being more difficult to implement in these settings, viewers may need to depend on context clues to identify words.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDisfluent fonts don't help people solve math problems.
J Exp Psychol Gen
April 2015
Department of Communication, Cornell University.
Prior research suggests that reducing font clarity can cause people to consider printed information more carefully. The most famous demonstration showed that participants were more likely to solve counterintuitive math problems when they were printed in hard-to-read font. However, after pooling data from that experiment with 16 attempts to replicate it, we find no effect on solution rates.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWant AI Summaries of new PubMed Abstracts delivered to your In-box?
Enter search terms and have AI summaries delivered each week - change queries or unsubscribe any time!