Could Comic Sans make you smarter? An exploration of the effects of disfluency on learning outcomes

Fluency refers to the subjective ease with which information is processed. Conversely, disfluency describes the subjective difficulty with which information is processed. Relative fluency influences judgments of the source information. Fluent sources are regarded as more truthful, familiar, likeable, famous, and intelligent. However, research evidence suggests that disfluency actually leads to better learning outcomes. Experiment 1 aims to replicate an experiment by Diemand-Yauman, Oppenheimer & Vaughan (2011), in which participants retained information about fictional alien species better when it was presented in a difficult to read font, as opposed to an easy to read font. Experiment 1 expanded upon Diemand-Yauman et al. (2011) by including a manipulation of font familiarity, to account for a confound of both the original experiment and a previous unsuccessful replication. No significant effect of font type or font familiarity on learning outcomes was found. Experiment 2 used a methodology based on that of Tangen, Constable, Durrant, Teeter, Beston & Kim (2010), with the aim of exploring fluency effects in a more ecological learning context. Experiment 2 presented participants with a text-based lecture on the human visual system in both fluent and disfluent fonts. The results revealed no significant effect of font type on performance for recall, recognition, or transfer questions. Given that the current results contradict the findings of Diemand- Yauman et al. (2011), further research is necessary to determine whether disfluency has a genuine effect on learning outcomes