The Contributions Of Beliefs And Processing Fluency To The Effect Of Font Size On Judgments Of Learning

Judgment of learning is a predictive judgment that learners remember the possibility of a item that has already been learned in a subsequent recall test.The cue utilization model believes that individuals can make judgment of learning based on different types of cues.Previous studies had found that font size as an external cue had an important impact on the immediate judgment of learning.Beliefs and processing fluency were two potential mechanisms by which font size affected judgment of learning.Based on the font size effect in judgment of learning,this study sorted out the shortcomings and controversies of previous researches,and designed three experiments from the two aspects of belief and processing fluency.In order to further explore the causes of the font size effected on judgment of learning.Experiment 1 required the participants to make both pre-judgment of learning and judgments of learning,and to evaluated the role of memory beliefs about font size in judgment of learning.Experiment 2 and Experiment 3 respectively examined the contribution of processing fluency to the effect of font size on judgments of learning based on the self-pace study time task and the number of acquisition trials task.The experimental results showed that:(1)The students' judgment of learning on large-font pairs was higher than the judgment of learning on small-word pairs,but the font size had no effect on the recall performance.(2)the participants had the belief that large font words were easier to remember than small font words,the pre-judgment of learning of the participants was higher than the judgment of learning,and this belief had a certain explanatory effect on the font size effect in judgment of learning.(3)There were obvious differences in the responses of the participants to the pre-judgment of learning on different font items,and the small font word pairs took more time than the large font words.(4)The font size affected the processing fluency defined by the self-pace study time and the number of acquisition trials,and the processing fluency had a certain contribution to the font size effect of the learning judgment.In summary,these results further illustrated that the font size effect of judgment of learning was a metacognitive illusion and also provided supporting evidence for the belief hypothesis and the processing fluency hypothesis.