个体关于加工流畅性的信念对字体大小效应的影响
摘要
<p id="C2">The font-size effect refers to the phenomenon by which the judgments of learning (JOLs) are higher for words presented in a larger versus smaller font size. Recently, it has received a great deal of attention in the area of metacognition because the cognitive mechanism of this effect can provide a way to understand how individuals make judgments of learning, which has been a central question in metacognitive monitoring research. So far, there have been two hypotheses about the mechanism underlying this effect: (a) the fluency hypothesis, which claims that JOLs are higher for larger words because they are presumably easier to process and (b) the belief hypothesis, which argues that the font-size effect is caused by people’s beliefs (e.g., beliefs about how font size affects memory). Recently, <xref xml:base="bibr" rid="b19">Mueller and Dunlosky (2017)</xref> proposed a new account that the individual’s belief about processing fluency could produce the font-size effect and went on to provide indirect evidence of this. Building on the work of Mueller and Dunlosky, the present study aims to provide direct evidence supporting this idea that beliefs about processing fluency influence the font-size effect. Furthermore, the current study extended the work of Mueller and Dunlosky by splitting the beliefs about processing fluency into two components: the impact of font size on processing fluency and the impact of processing fluency on memory performance.<br/>In this study, we conducted two experiments to investigate the influence of beliefs about processing fluency on the font-size effect via different instructions. Experiment 1 focused on the influence of beliefs about how font size impacts processing fluency on JOLs. Seventy-five participants were randomly assigned to three groups: group 1 received instructions about how the large font words were easier to process, group 2 received instructions about how small font words were easier to process, while the control