Has anyone heard of this new font that helps people memorize what they read? Sans Forgetica was developed by a team at RMIT University and is exploding over Social Media with the perspective that it can help people better remember their digital notes.
As educators, we know that sometimes we just have to write things out a couple of times to remember them. I remember as a kid, drilling out verb conjugations, spelling words, and multiplication tables, to remember all of the different facts. What if a font could be developed that helped our brains cognitively connect with what we read to help us better understand it? Could we then move past the need to be writing everything down? Would this help us shift to a more mobile culture, especially in education?
Although the creators of Sans Forgetica believe this font does increase cognitive memory, there have also been other studies conducted by the University of Warwick and the University of Waikato demonstrating that this new font does not actually help with memory retention.
Andrea Taylor, Mevagh Sanson, Ryan Burnell, Kimberley A. Wade, Maryanne Garry. Disfluent difficulties are not desirable difficulties: the (lack of) effect of Sans Forgetica on memory. Memory, 2020; 1 https://doi.org/10.1080/09658211.2020.1758726
Thanks for this. Just the name of the typeface makes me smile!
In the early days of my career I did a lot of design and production work, and I was a huge “font head” — like Pokemon, I felt I had to catch them all, and enjoyed a massive collection of them (most of which I never found need to use). Most typefaces distinguished themselves stylistically (e.g., “this one has very elegant weighting” and “this one evokes the roaring twenties” and “this one is the one from Star Trek”) but off the top of my head the only typeface I can recall being designed specifically for a non-artistic purpose was the family of “OCR” typefaces — still visible at the bottom of your bank cheques — designed to be unambiguously read by machines (before machines could read pretty much anything, including sloppy handwriting).
This one is interesting. It’s a bit of a challenge to the eye in terms of legibility (how easily we can distinguish individual glyphs from one another) but curiously better at readability (how easily we can view and process whole words and sentences). Not an expert here, but if I had to guess, I’d say that some of its purported cognitive advantages are found in the missing parts of each letterform — they all seem to be missing a little bit that our brain has to fill in.– and perhaps that’s how reading this typeface could mimic writing from a cognitive point of view. It doesn’t really feel like work to read it, but our brains are doing a bit of work anyway, so it sticks.
Hi Elixa,
As a native English speaker and foreign language learner, I have noticed that the pictographs in Japanese and Chinese are often related to a particular object such as the days of the week are similarly named as in English. For example, the symbol for moon is used for Monday, Tuesday has the symbol for fire, Wednesday has water, Thursday has a tree, and Friday has gold (easy to remember if it’s payday). I would imagine remembering text is challenging and using strategies to remember vocabulary still need to be employed. I think of how logos are easier to remember rather than just the text, perhaps a picture element needs to be associated with it.
An excerpt from Perez et al, 2017 suggests retention of words include the following exercises:
1. Word cards (Quizlet is wonderful for this)
2. Association with pictures (as mentioned, also Quizlet)
3. Association with a Topic (Short telling such as fables, and other narrative forms)
Pérez, L. M., & Alvira, R. (2017). The acquisition of vocabulary through three memory strategies. Colombian Applied Linguistics Journal, 19(1), 103-116.
This is really interesting Elixa. I can see where such an argument could be controversial. Many arguments on memory retention have been criticized particularly if they have only been observed with native English speakers. When similar studies are conducted on non-native English speakers it is not uncommon to observe different results. Though the Sans Forgetica Font has likely been exploding on Social Media, I would love to ask a non-native English speaker living in a different country if they have heard anything on their Media feeds about this topic. I am glad that you posted this Elixa, as well as supported the argument with academic research to debunk the hype on Social Media.