Faculty News

Prof. Adam Alter's research on cognitive disfluency is mentioned

Excerpt from Smithsonian Magazine -- "Even the perception of speed can be deceptive. When things come easily or quickly, when we don’t have to struggle, we tend to feel smarter, a concept termed fluency. In one study, Adam Alter and fellow psychologists at New York University asked volunteers to answer a series of questions typed in either a crisp, clear font (a fluent experience) or a slightly blurred, harder to read version (a disfluent one). The people who had to work harder ended up processing the text more deeply and responding to the questions more accurately."

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