Date of Award

2014

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Psychology

Committee Chair

Jodi Price

Committee Member

Jeffrey Neuschatz

Committee Member

Aurora Torres

Subject(s)

Association of ideas, Metacognition, Cognition, Visual perception

Abstract

Prior research has shown that people perceive heavier items and those presented in larger fonts as more memorable than lighter items presented in smaller fonts. This occurs despite the fact that weight and font size have been found to not impact actual recall performance. The present study examined how the physical size of the items represented in unrelated word pairs interacted with font size to influence younger adult participants' judgments of learning (JOLs; i.e., ratings regarding the likelihood of remembering an item) and actual recall performance. Results indicated that participants not only gave higher JOLs to large stimuli word pairs in 48 pt. font, but they also recalled these at a higher rate than small stimuli in 18 pt. font. This indicates that the cues of font size and stimuli size influenced participants' encoding, as measured by their JOLs, as well as retrieval.

Share

COinS
 
 

To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately,
you may Download the file to your hard drive.

NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.