The Features of Processing Fluency in Memorization

Processing fluency is the subjective feeling that information is easy to process. It has been actively studied recently by many researchers, and a number of interesting effects have already been discovered. Thus, more fluent information is evaluated as more plausible, attractive, well-known, etc. At the same time, the opposite is assumed in the question of the impact on memorization — disfluent information will contribute to better memorization. This disfluency effect has been investigated in a number of studies, and not all of them have been able to show its existence. It has been suggested that the reason for this is other factors that affect its manifestation. In this paper, the presence of images accompanying verbal information was considered as such a moderator for the disfluency effect. In cognitive psychology, there are known effects associated with the beneficial impact of images on memory, so it was expected that the effect of disfluency would manifest itself only when there were no images. The hypotheses were not confirmed — the effect of disfluency was not detected under any conditions. Moreover, contradicting results were shown for the influence of images. The two experiments and other studies are discussed in this paper in the context of R. Bjork's principle of desirable difficulties and the theory J. Sweller’s cognitive load theory, on the basis of which fundamentally different predictions about the impact of fluency on memory can be made.