Date of Award

2020

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Psychology

Committee Chair

Jodi Price

Committee Member

Aurora Torres

Committee Member

Jeffrey Neuschatz

Subject(s)

Psychology of learning, Memory, Visual perception, Computer fonts

Abstract

Participants give higher judgments of learning to words presented in large font compared to those in small font despite memory performance not differing. One argument is large fonts seem more fluent than small. Another suggests participants have memory beliefs that large fonts will be more memorable. The present study sought to tease apart these arguments using vision impairment. We were also interested if self-regulated learning habits of these individuals differ. Both vision-impaired and unimpaired participants studied word pairs presented in both fonts. After studying the word pairs, participants were asked to select up to half of the word pairs they would restudy. Across conditions, participants gave higher JOLs to large font items compared to small. The same pattern was found for recall; participants showed higher recall for large font items compared to small. These results suggest that it is unclear whether fluency had a greater impact over memory beliefs.

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