The role of answer fluency and perceptual fluency as metacognitive cues for initiating analytic thinking

The role of answer fluency and perceptual fluency in the monitoring and control of reasoning: Reply to

“…We argue and provide evidence that the tasks were not too difficult for our populations (such that no amount of "metacognitive unease" would promote correct responding) and point out that in many cases performance on our tasks was well above chance or on a par with Alter et al's (2007) participants. Finally, we reiterate our claim that the distinction between answer fluency (the ease with which an answer comes to mind) and perceptual fluency (the ease with which a problem can be read) is genuine, and argue that Thompson et al (2013) provided evidence that these are distinct factors that have different downstream effects on cognitive processes. Answer and Perceptual Fluency 3 The role of answer fluency and perceptual fluency in the monitoring and control of reasoning:…”

Effects of disfluency on cognitive and metacognitive processes and outcomes

“…However, recent research challenges these findings. In three experiments of Thompson et al (2013) as well as in 13 experiments of Meyer et al (2015), null effects of disfluency for reasoning tasks occurred, which were also not moderated by cognitive ability (measured by SAT score). Pooling over all experiments including the one by Alter et al (2007), there was an overall flat null effect of disfluency (Meyer et al 2015), suggesting that disfluency (via font manipulation) does not activate analytic reasoning.…”

Why are background telephone conversations distracting?

“…However, the literature on the disfluency effect is mixed as to whether the use of a disfluent font impacts, or not, upon the execution of a task. While some seminal studies suggested that disfluent fonts were beneficial to learning and comprehension (e.g., Diemand-Yauman et al, 2011) and non-intuitive problem solving tasks (Alter, Oppenheimer, Epley, & Eyre, 2007), subsequent work, including direct replications of previous studies, has cast doubt on the beneficial effect of disfluency on task performance (e.g., Meyer et al, 2015;Thompson et al, 2013). Since we found that disfluency had no effect on task performance in the baseline, quiet condition of Experiment 2, we cannot recommend disfluency in general.…”