Disfluent difficulties are not desirable difficulties: the (lack of) effect of Sans Forgetica on memory

ABSTRACT

Scientists working at the intersection of cognitive psychology and education have developed theoretically-grounded methods to help people learn. One important yet counterintuitive finding is that making information harder to learn – that is, creating desirable difficulties – benefits learners. Some studies suggest that simply presenting information in a difficult-to-read font could serve as a desirable difficulty and therefore promote learning. To address this possibility, we examined the extent to which Sans Forgetica, a newly developed font, improves memory performance – as the creators of the font claim. Across four experiments, we set out to replicate unpublished findings by the font’s creators. Subjects read information in Sans Forgetica or Arial, and rated how difficult the information was to read (Experiment 1) or attempted to recall the information (Experiments 2–4). Although subjects rated Sans Forgetica as being more difficult to read than Arial, Sans Forgetica led to equivalent memory performance, and sometimes even impaired it. These findings suggest that although Sans Forgetica promotes a feeling of disfluency, it does not create a desirable difficulty or benefit memory.

KEYWORDS:

• Fluency
• desirable difficulties
• memory
• font
• education

Acknowledgements

A. Taylor and R. Burnell gratefully acknowledge support from the University of Waikato. We thank Andrew Butler for sharing his materials with us, Sarah Hall for coding the data from Experiment 4, and the Sans Forgetica team for sharing information regarding their experiments with us.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 As exploratory measures, we also asked subjects three questions to measure the extent to which they believed they would retain the information and would be willing to use Sans Forgetica to study. Because these findings are not central to our research question, we report these data in the Supplemental Materials.

2 We thank Andrew Butler for providing us with his composed list of highly associated word pairs.