Abstract
Important information is often presented in large fonts, a tactic used to direct individuals’ attention and emphasize relevance. In a series of experiments, we tested whether font size, a perceptual cue that may communicate relative importance, may influence one’s curiosity, judgments of learning (JOLs), and recall. Participants were presented with lists of word pairs consisting of rare English words and their more commonly known synonyms. After being shown the rare word in small (12-point) or large (48-point) font, they rated how curious they were to learn its synonym, studied the synonym, and judged how likely they were to remember it at a later time before completing an immediate cued-recall test. We found that individuals exhibited greater curiosity towards large versus small items (Experiments 1a and 1b), but JOLs were unaffected by font size (Experiments 1a and 1c), perhaps due to a reliance on other perceptual cues (e.g., word structure, mental imagery) during encoding (Experiment 1c) or opportunities for pretesting attenuating the font-size JOL effect (Experiment 1d). Moreover, although large items were rated as more important to learn (Experiment 2), the positive relationship between font size and recall (Experiments 1 and 2) was only mediated by curiosity and not perceived importance (Experiment 2). Overall, our findings provide insight into how perceptual cues may influence how individuals select, process, and remember information, contributing to our understanding of how curiosity and memory are shaped by perceptual processes.