How does font affect memory

Yet much more research is needed to understand the generalizability, boundary conditions and moderators of the effect of perceptually degraded vs. Another line of research, which is more relevant to the current study, focused on perceptual features of to-be-remembered words or word pairs.

Following Rhodes and Castel , a common manipulation involved varying the font size of the words, usually point versus point font. In light of these findings, the use of font size as a cue to predict memory has been interpreted as reflecting a metamemory illusion Rhodes and Castel, However, a recent meta-analysis over these studies Luna et al.

The small mnemonic benefit of the larger font words was also reported in few other recent studies Price et al. This evidence leads to a reinterpretation of the use of font size as a cue when predicting subsequent memory. Rather than reflecting a memory illusion, it appears to reflect a mismatched effect of font size on memory and metamemory.

The current research extended previous studies by examining the effect of font size on memory and metamemory for words with elementary school children. Despite the recent growing interest in the effect of perceptual features on learning and metacognition in adults, little research on this matter has been conducted with children.

This is unfortunate given the potential practical implications of such research for education. Reading skills develop during elementary school years Perfetti, ; Katzir et al. With experience, children develop the ability to use context and meaning to decipher words and reading becomes more fluent and effortless. This developmental shift has been referred to as a shift from learning to read to reading in order to learn Chall, A number of studies e.

These studies suggest that adequate perceptual analysis is required for proper reading and that it can be enhanced by clear text design. If clear perceptual properties enhance reading accuracy and efficiency, they should leave young readers more cognitive resources and time for elaborated processing than degraded perceptual features, which in turn should enhance subsequent recall and comprehension. Katzir et al. In another study, French et al.

Furthermore, they observed that dyslexic children also benefited from reading in a non-standard font, and to a greater degree than non-dyslexic children. Thompson et al. In contrast, a study by Miele et al. They observed better reading comprehension of third and fifth graders when texts were presented in a clear font in terms of font type and brightness than in an unclear font. Koriat et al. Both age groups demonstrated the belief that recall should tend to increase with study time and, indeed, study time was a valid cue for remembering for both age groups.

Do children use font size as a cue when monitoring their learning? The Miele et al. Do children relay on font size as a cue when monitoring their own learning? Clearly, more research is needed before any strong conclusions can be made. The current research takes one step toward this end.

The purpose of the current research was to examine the effect of font size of written words on memory and metamemory in elementary school children. We examined both younger first grade and older fifth—sixth grade children. Participants studied words written in either a large or a small font and gave a JOL, estimating the chance they would later be able to recall these words, and then took a free-recall memory test.

Participants were 59 first graders and 46 fifth and sixth graders from a public school in Israel, with a population of predominantly moderate to high socioeconomic status. All children were native Hebrew speakers, had no vision problems, and no documented history of learning disabilities.

All were tested individually toward the end of the academic year, between April and June. Three first graders and two fifth—sixth graders who scored two standard divisions above or below the mean in at least one of the baseline tests were excluded from the analyses, resulting in a final sample of 56 first graders 28 male; age range 6—7. Before testing, written informed consent was obtained from the parents of the participants.

Participants were tested individually in a quiet room. In the first session, they completed standardized tests real words and non-words reading rate and accuracy, Shany et al. In the second session, participants completed the main task. Materials for this phase consisted of two age-appropriate lists of 24 Hebrew words each, one for each age group, taken from norms Morag, , Unpublished; see also Dotan and Katzir, ; Hadad et al.

All words were two-syllables, 3—5 letter nouns with relatively high frequency 4 or 5 on a 1—5 scale, as rated by 10 elementary school teachers; Morag, , Unpublished. Each list was randomly divided into two sets of 12 items each, which were also matched on familiarity and number of letters. Participants were seated at a chair placed approximately 80 cm 31 inches; measured from the back of the chair from a inch computer screen. They were asked to read aloud and study words for a later memory test and were informed that the words would be displayed in various font sizes.

The 24 words were then presented one at a time on a computer screen for 8 s each in black David font on a white background. Words from one set were presented in a point font and words from the other set were presented in an point font actual sizes of these fonts on the inch screen were 9. The assignment of font size to sets was counterbalanced across participants.

Words from the two sets were presented in alternation. The first and last words one in a small font size and the other in a large font size, counterbalanced across participants , served as primacy and recency buffers, and were excluded from all analyses. Words for fifth—sixth graders were presented either with or without diacritic marks—the two Hebrew orthography formats that children at this age are used to reading—between participants.

We had no specific prediction regarding the role of diacritic marks on memory or metamemory performance. The results below are therefore reported collapsed across these two versions. For the sake of completeness, results for the effect of diacritic marks are reported in the Appendix.

Immediately following the presentation of each word, participants provided a JOL. They were prompted to estimate the chance that they would later be able to recall that word, on a child-friendly five-point scale adopted from Kasperski and Katzir This scale consisted of five facial expressions ranging from happy to sad, and labeled extremely confident , somewhat confident , hesitant , somewhat unconfident , and extremely unconfident see Figure 1.

Participants had 8 s to provide their JOL by pointing at the appropriate facial expression, and the experimenter recorded their response. Immediately following the presentation of the study list, participants engaged in a filler task for 30 s, solving a maze. Then they were asked to freely recall out loud as many list words as they could while the experimenter recorded their responses.

All children included in the final sample were able to read aloud all the words in the main task. On the test, there were relatively few intrusions i. Figure 2 presents the means and standard errors of the JOLs and number of words correctly recalled by age group and font size see Supplementary Table S1 for the raw data. We conducted two-way mixed analyses of variance on each of the dependent measures reported below, with age group as a between-subjects factor and font size as a within-subjects factor.

Mean number of words recalled A and judgments of learning B by age group and font size. Error bars represent 1 standard error of the mean. First, we examined the effect of font size and age group on memory performance in terms of the number of recalled words. Results revealed a significant main effect of age group. Results further revealed a small but significant main effect of font size.

These results suggest that, for children, larger font size enhances memory. Next, we examined the effect of font size and age group on JOLs. This finding suggests that first graders were more confident in their ability to remember words than the fifth—sixth graders, despite actual lower recall performance. Importantly, results further revealed a significant main effect of font size. These results suggest that children, just as adults in previous studies, used font size as a cue and estimated they would recall large font words better than small font words.

Although beyond the central purpose of the current study, we also examined the effect of font size on JOLs accuracy in terms of resolution see Susser et al. Resolution is the relative correspondence between the predicted JOLs and actual memory performance. It reflects the ability of participants to distinguish in their JOLs between words they would recall and words they would not remember. Resolution was examined in terms of the within-participants Goodman—Kruskal gamma correlations between JOLs and whether a word was recalled or not.

Eleven first graders and one fifth—sixth grader were excluded from the analysis because they had no variance for either JOLs or memory performance for at least one of the font sizes. We examined the effect of font size and age group on these correlations. As far as we know, the current experiment was the first to examine the effect of font size on memory and metamemory in children.

The results suggest that overall, first graders remembered fewer words yet gave higher JOLs than the fifth—sixth graders. Importantly, the children predicted they would remember large font size words better than small font size words, and they actually remembered the large font size words slightly better. Age group did not interact with the effect of font size on either memory or metamemory. It is consistent with the findings for adults that have been repeatedly replicated since the original study by Rhodes and Castel ; see Luna et al.

Luna et al. In other words, font size does not reflect a case in which metamemory relies on cues that are not predictive of learning, but rather a case in which metamemory relies on cues that are predictive of learning but does so disproportionally. The current results support this interpretation and extend it to elementary school children. Interestingly, both the younger and the older children relied on font size as a cue, and to a similar extent, despite developmental trends in the use of other cues Koriat et al.

Together with the finding that font size is consistently used as a cue by young adults Luna et al. To use the terminology suggested by cognitive load theory Sweller et al. However, one should keep in mind that cognitive load theory was usually applied to relatively complex learning materials, whereas the current study demonstrates the idea with more simple stimuli of single words.

For younger children first-second graders , larger font size enhanced both memory in the current study and reading comprehension in the study. These results support the need for and the often-used practice of using larger fonts sizes in instructional materials for younger children, not only for the sake of reading per se , but also for the sake of learning outcomes.

For older children fifth—sixth graders , larger font size enhanced memory in the current study but impaired reading comprehension in the study. Therefore, the effect of font size on learning might depend not only on age, but also on the criterion task or the goal of learning McDaniel and Butler, However, caution is needed when comparing the results of the two studies because the actual font sizes were different i.

Of course, few issues await future research. First, the task used in the current study was built after the common method in previous font size experiments e. Future research might examine whether the similar effects of font size on memory and metamemory for adults in previous studies and children in the current study persist when the same parameters are used for adults and children. Using adult participants, Halamish in press and Undorf and Zimdahl recently observed that under certain conditions, not only large but also very small fonts e.

Together, these studies emphasize that the strength of the perceptual manipulation might moderate its effect on memory and that is should be considered in future research with adults and children alike.

The current research suggests that, as adults, children use font size as a cue when monitoring their own learning and predict better memory for larger font words, and that they indeed remember larger font words slightly better. Pedagogical tools developed for children might take into consideration the potential positive, thought relatively subtle, effect of larger print on learning.

More research is needed, however, to examine whether the effect generalizes to other populations e. Yet, the current results provide the interesting insight that for children, small, technical changes in display format of textual materials results in meaningful effects on both metacognition and memory. HN conducted the experiment. VH and HN analyzed the data. The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Alter, A. Uniting the tribes of fluency to form a metacognitive nation. Bjork, E. Gernsbacher, R. Pew, L. Google Scholar. Bjork, R. Chall, J. Stages of Reading Development. Diemand-Yauman, C. Fortune favors the bold and the italicized : effects of disfluency on educational outcomes. Cognition , — Dotan, S. Mind the gap: increased inter-letter spacing as a means of improving reading performance. Child Psychol. Dunlosky, J. Recommendations for exploring the disfluency hypothesis for establishing whether perceptually degrading materials impacts performance.

Dweck, C. Philadelphia, PA: Psychology Press. Eitel, A. Effects of disfluency and test expectancy on learning with text. Disfluency meets cognitive load in multimedia learning: does harder-to-read mean better-to-understand?

French, M. Changing fonts in education: how the benefits vary with ability and dyslexia. Hadad, L. Orthographic transparency enhances morphological segmentation in children reading hebrew words. Several studies that tried to replicate the benefit of hard-to-read fonts found that they may have zero or even a detrimental effect on learning. Sans Forgetica has also received criticism for a lack of empirical evidence behind it. Overall, these mixed results warrant further research into the relationship between font disfluency and memory.

Font characteristics such as style, size and color play a role in information retention or recall, too, because font design is vital to our familiarity — or unfamiliarity — with a given word, says Banham. Experiments have demonstrated a U-shape relationship between font size and memory: Large font items may predict higher recall regardless of font style, but very small font sizes can also introduce a desirable difficulty.

However, texts with difficult-to-read font sizes or challenging color contrast may pose more of a readability issue rather than a legibility one. Although both are involved in the visual clarity of a given text, readability relates to the ease of understanding or reading words and sentences, while legibility refers to the ability to distinguish between characters or glyphs.

Using font styles like bold or italics to indicate significance in a given text can improve retention because people are better able to remember information they consider important, says Oppenheimer.

Researchers found that bolded text has a higher recall than text in italic or regular styles, regardless of the font size. However, if an entire document is in bold, the emphasis is lost and readers can no longer spot vital passages. Knowing the impact of fonts on our cognitive processes has real-world applications, according to experts.

For instance, distracting sounds like background chatter or environmental noise from aircraft and road traffic are shown to be detrimental to crucial parameters studied in students and office workers, like text memory, reading comprehension and attentional function. This finding prompted researchers to look into the effect of hard-to-read fonts — they learned that the increased engagement and task demand from the disfluency can significantly reduce one's processing of background noise.

By continuing to research how basic memory processes function, we can discover how to help people retain information more efficiently.

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