Guenther R Kim
Department of Psychology, Hamline University, St Paul, MN 55104, USA.
Psychol Rep. 2012 Jun;110(3):946-54. doi: 10.2466/01.11.28.PR0.110.3.946-954.
Processing fluency is known to affect a variety of cognitive assessments, but most research has not examined such effects in the context of a real-life experience. In the first experiment, college students, enrolled in either a statistics or cognitive psychology course, read a course syllabus which varied in the clarity of its font and frequency of its vocabulary. Based on the syllabus, students then forecasted their final course grade and the course's difficulty. Despite methodological similarity to other fluency experiments and adequate statistical power, there were no significant differences in forecasts across fluency conditions. Fluency may be discounted in a task which provides information that affects people's lives. This interpretation was bolstered by a second experiment whose participants were students in a statistics course. These students read the cognitive course's syllabus and forecasted better grades and less difficulty in the cognitive course when the font of the syllabus was more clear than unclear.
已知加工流畅性会影响各种认知评估，但大多数研究并未在现实生活体验的背景下考察此类影响。在第一个实验中，选修统计学或认知心理学课程的大学生阅读了一份课程大纲，大纲的字体清晰度和词汇出现频率各不相同。然后，学生们根据大纲预测自己的课程期末成绩和课程难度。尽管该实验在方法上与其他流畅性实验相似且具备足够的统计效力，但在不同流畅性条件下的预测结果并无显著差异。在一项提供会影响人们生活信息的任务中，流畅性可能会被忽视。第二个实验支持了这一解释，该实验的参与者是统计学课程的学生。当课程大纲的字体清晰而非模糊时，这些学生阅读认知课程的大纲并预测该课程成绩更好、难度更低。
