Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The disfluent font Sans Forgetica was designed to create a desirable difficulty in text and be a potential learning tool. The current literature reports mixed findings on Sans Forgetica's effectiveness in improving memory. Most studies only report on Sans Forgetica's use for specific word recall, while only one, to our knowledge, used open-ended inferential questions on short passages. The current study reports on the use of Sans Forgetica for close-ended inferential questions, using standardized multiple choice exam questions to measure the potential efficacy of Sans Forgetica in classroom like materials. We recruited college-aged participants (n = 38) who each read two passages, one using Arial and another using Sans Forgetica. We report that the use of Sans Forgetica in reading materials had a significantly worse reading comprehension score (p < 0.05) with a null effect on passage reading time.