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It's too late for me to edit this comment, but I was wrong to dismiss Sans Forgetica based on the review. I checked the paper and it notes: > Although the more general prevalence of “desirable difficulties” (Bjork, 1994) is beyond the scope of this article, several research groups have found that disfluent fonts improve performance on memory tasks (Cotton et al, 2014, Diemand-Yauman, Oppenheimer, & Vaughan, 2011; French et al., 2013; Lee, 2013; Sungkhasettee, Friedman, & Castel, 2011; Weltman & Eakin, 2014). Though some have also failed to replicate these effects (Eitel, Kühl, Scheiter, & Gerjets, 2014; Yue, Castel, & Bjork, 2013), the balance of evidence suggests that disfluent fonts may aid memory but not reasoning—presumably because reading words more slowly benefits memory, but not reasoning. Credit to kradroy for noting the discrepancy and prompting me to check. I regret the error :( |
I was doing research in this area in 2005-2006. Mine was focused on recall of English vocabulary by ESL learners. I chose to explore spacing intervals (a hot topic then). The font disfluency aspect isn't something I had heard of until today. I did a cursory search and found the first mentions of it between 2007 and 2011.
I wish I had proposed using Comic Sans over Arial to improve recall. It would have made my experiments (and analysis turnaround) quicker than a semester. :)