Luna, K. & Oliveira, J.
School of Psychology, University of Minho, Portugal
Past research has shown that font size increases the judgments of learning that a word will be remembered at a later time, but that it does not affect memory performance in a recall test. This dissociation has been explained because participants erroneously consider that the subjective ease of processing a large word will be predictive of future ease of retrieval, even though the font size do not affect performance. Our aim was to test if another perceptual characteristic, namely boldface, could also lead to a misinterpretation of the ease of processing. A second objective was to examine if font size or boldface could affect another measure of metamemory, i.e., retrospective confidence. Participants read words in a small font, in a large font, and in a small font in boldface, and made judgments of learning. After a distractor task a recognition test and a confidence rating that the answer was correct was required. Results suggested that boldface words did not elicit the misinterpretation of the ease of processing elicited by large font words, and that retrospective confidence was not very sensitive to changes in the typeface.