Sans Forgetica is not desirable for learning

ABSTRACT

Do students learn better with material that is perceptually hard to process? While evidence is mixed, recent claims suggest that placing materials in Sans Forgetica, a perceptually difficult-to-process typeface, has positive impacts on student learning. Given the weak evidence for other similar perceptual disfluency effects, we examined the mnemonic effects of Sans Forgetica more closely in comparison to other learning strategies across three preregistered experiments. In Experiment 1, participants studied weakly related cue-target pairs with targets presented in either Sans Forgetica or with missing letters (e.g., cue: G_RL, the generation effect). Cued recall performance showed a robust effect of generation, but no Sans Forgetica memory benefit. In Experiment 2, participants read an educational passage about ground water with select sentences presented in either Sans Forgetica typeface, yellow pre-highlighting, or unmodified. Cued recall for select words was better for pre-highlighted information than an unmodified pure reading condition. Critically, presenting sentences in Sans Forgetica did not elevate cued recall compared to an unmodified pure reading condition or a pre-highlighted condition. In Experiment 3, individuals did not have better discriminability for Sans Forgetica relative to a fluent condition in an old-new recognition test. Our findings suggest that Sans Forgetica really is forgettable.

KEYWORDS:

• Disfluency
• desirable difficulties
• learning and memory
• education

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by grant number 220020429 from the James S. McDonnell Foundation awarded to the third author.

Disclosure statement

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

Author contributions

JG wrote the first draft of the manuscript and conducted all statistical analyses. SD collected data and programmed Experiment 1. JG collected data and programmed Experiments 2 and 3. JG, SD, and DP conceptualised the studies, reviewed, and edited the manuscript.

R Packages and Acknowledgements

The results were created using R (Version 4.0.0; R Core Team, 2019) and the R-packages afex (Version 0.27.2; Singmann et al., 2019), BayesFactor (Version 0.9.12.4.2; Morey & Rouder, 2018), data.table (Version 1.12.8; Dowle & Srinivasan, 2019), dplyr (Version 1.0.0; Wickham et al., 2019), , emmeans (Version 1.4.7; Lenth, 2020), ggplot2 (Version 3.3.2; Wickham, 2016), , here (Version 0.1; Müller, 2017), janitor (Version 2.0.1; Firke, 2020), knitr (Version 1.28; Xie, 2015), , papaja (Version 0.1.0.9942; Aust & Barth, 2020), patchwork (Version 1.0.0; Pedersen, 2019), qualtRics (Version 3.1.3; Ginn & Silge, 2020), readr (Version 1.3.1; Wickham et al., 2018), Rmisc (Version 1.5; Hope, 2013), see (Version 0.5.0; Lüdecke et al., 2020), stringr (Version 1.4.0; Wickham, 2019), tidyverse (Version 1.3.0; Wickham, 2017).

Notes

1 Due to a programming error, the English fluency question was not asked.

2 Two cue-target pairs (e.g., range-rifle and train-plane) had to be thrown out as they were not presented due to a coding error. This left us with 22 weakly related cue-target pairs.

3 Originally, we had 12 critical phrases, but a pilot test showed that one of the questions appeared twice and accuracy was low. Instead of adding another question, we removed one question from the final test and added an attention check question to ensure participants were paying attention. The reduced number of questions made the task a bit easier for participants.

4 Tukey adjusted p-values.

5 Formula was taken from Stanislaw & Todorov (1999).

6 We did not collect study times in Experiments 1 and 2 because of the designs used. In Experiment 3 we were able to use the Gorilla platform that boasts millisecond accuracy (Anwyl-Irvine et al., 2020)

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by James S. McDonnell Foundation: [grant number 220020429].