Fluency heuristic is not everyone’s rule

April, 2011

Two experiments indicate that judgment about how well something is learned is based on encoding fluency only for people who believe intelligence is a fixed attribute.

It’s well-established that feelings of encoding fluency are positively correlated with judgments of learning, so it’s been generally believed that people primarily use the simple rule, easily learned = easily remembered (ELER), to work out whether they’re likely to remember something (as discussed in the previous news report). However, new findings indicate that the situation is a little more complicated.

In the first experiment, 75 English-speaking students studied 54 Indonesian-English word pairs. Some of these were very easy, with the English words nearly identical to their Indonesian counterpart (e.g, Polisi-Police); others required more effort but had a connection that helped (e.g, Bagasi-Luggage); others were entirely dissimilar (e.g., Pembalut-Bandage).

Participants were allowed to study each pair for as long as they liked, then asked how confident they were about being able to recall the English word when supplied the Indonesian word on an upcoming test. They were tested at the end of their study period, and also asked to fill in a questionnaire which assessed the extent to which they believed that intelligence is fixed or changeable.

It’s long been known that theories of intelligence have important effects on people's motivation to learn. Those who believe each person possesses a fixed level of intelligence (entity theorists) tend to disengage when something is challenging, believing that they’re not up to the challenge. Those who believe that intelligence is malleable (incremental theorists) keep working, believing that more time and effort will yield better results.

The study found that those who believed intelligence is fixed did indeed follow the ELER heuristic, with their judgment of how well an item was learned nicely matching encoding fluency.

However those who saw intelligence as malleable did not follow the rule, but rather seemed to be following the reverse heuristic: that effortful encoding indicates greater engagement in learning, and thus is a sign that they are more likely to remember. This group therefore tended to be marginally underconfident of easy items, marginally overconfident for medium-level items, and significantly overconfident for difficult items.

However, the entanglement of item difficulty and encoding fluency weakens this finding, and accordingly a second experiment separated these two attributes.

In this experiment, 41 students were presented with two lists of nine words, one list of which was in small font (18-point Arial) and one in large font (48-point Arial). Each word was displayed for four seconds. While font size made no difference to their actual levels of recall, entity theorists were much more confident of recalling the large-size words than the small-size ones. The incremental theorists were not, however, affected by font-size.

It is suggested that the failure to find evidence of a ‘non-fluency heuristic’ in this case may be because participants had no control over learning time, therefore were less able to make relative judgments of encoding effort. Nevertheless, the main finding, that people varied in their use of the fluency heuristic depending on their beliefs about intelligence, was clear in both cases.

Reference: 

[2182] Miele, D. B., Finn B., & Molden D. C.
(2011).  Does Easily Learned Mean Easily Remembered?.
Psychological Science. 22(3), 320 - 324.

Related News

I have said before that there is little evidence that

I’ve mentioned before that, for some few people, exercise doesn’t seem to have a benefit, and the benefits of exercise for fighting age-related cognitive decline may not apply to those carrying the Alzheimer’s gene.

Following on from research finding that people who regularly play action video games show visual attention related differences in brain activity compared to non-players, a new study has investigated whether such changes could be elicited in 25 volunteers who hadn’t played video games in at least

Genetic analysis of 9,232 older adults (average age 67; range 56-84) has implicated four genes in how fast your

A number of studies have found evidence that older adults can benefit from cognitive training.

Previous research has pointed to a typical decline in our sense of control as we get older. Maintaining a sense of control, however, appears to be a key factor in successful aging.

A small study involving 20 people has found that those who were exposed to 1,8-cineole, one of the main chemical components of rosemary essential oil, performed better on mental arithmetic tasks.

This is another demonstration of stereotype threat, which is also a nice demonstration of the contextual nature of intelligence. The study involved 70 volunteers (average age 25; range 18-49), who were put in groups of 5.

One of the few established cognitive differences between men and women lies in spatial ability. But in recent years, this ‘fact’ has been shaken by evidence that training can close the gap between the genders.

Benefits of high quality child care persist 30 years later

Pages

Subscribe to Latest newsSubscribe to Latest newsSubscribe to Latest health newsSubscribe to Latest news
Error | About memory

Error

The website encountered an unexpected error. Please try again later.