Search results for: “cognitive fluency”
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Price Reductions and Cognitive Fluency
If the mental calculation required to determine the discount given on a product is difficult then we often misjudge the magnitude of the reduction. This “ease-of-computation” effect for judging price reductions is obviously related to other recent studies looking at ‘cognitive fluency‘ and is another way to manipulate and be manipulated through product pricing. Consumers’…
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The Influence of Cognitive Fluency
We’ve seen before how the cognitive fluency (how ‘easy’ it is to think of or comprehend something) of restaurant menus, stock ticker codes and physical exercises influence how complex, risky and even beautiful we perceive them to be. A recent PsyBlog article provides a summary of a number of cognitive fluency studies and here are…
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Typography, Pronunciation and Cognitive Fluency
How easy something is to read and understand significantly affects how we perceive it in terms of its risk, beauty, difficulty, credibility and truthfulness. Factors that influence this cognitive fluency include typography (typeface choice, contrast, etc.), ease of pronunciation, familiarity and how much the words rhyme. The cover story of this month’s The Psychologist is…
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Hard-to-Read Fonts Improve Learning
Much has been written on the positive aspects of cognitive fluency (in terms of typography, accents, and almost everything else), but a recent study (pdf, doi) suggests that the opposite (cognitive disfluency) could lead to better learning. The theory is that harder-to-process material requires “deeper processing” and that this deeper processing leads to superior memory performance. Earlier…
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Year Three in Review
And so another year has passed since my last review. It’s been a busy year of learning a new language in my equally new country of residence, changing jobs (and everything that entails) and, of course, writing 200 posts here on Lone Gunman (and thanks again to you: there’s been hundreds of comments… and 49,810 spam comments). The…
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Foreign Accents Make Statements Less Trustworthy
Due to the principles of processing fluency (also known as cognitive fluency, discussed here many times before), we know that information that is easier to process is perceived to be–among other features–more familiar, pleasant, truthful and less risky. A recent study has shown that this is also true for foreign accents: statements spoken by non-native…
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Year Two in Review
Another year, a further 445 posts and an additional 17,790 spam comments have passed (and 453 legitimate comments, for which I am eternally grateful–thanks!) and Lone Gunman is now two years old. Somewhat delayed since I’ve recently moved to the Netherlands, here are the best things I’ve read on the Internet and posted here over…
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Cognition Nutrition
The Economist has an interesting article on the science behind cognitive nutrition. Some foods […] are like pharmaceutical compounds; their effects are so profound that the mental health of entire countries may be linked to them. Last year, for example, the Lancet published research showing that folic-acid supplements—sometimes taken by pregnant women—can help those between…