Reasoning and meta-reasoning are independent of perception

New psychological research. 2026. No. 4.

Berezner T.

Background. Our work was devoted to the influence of processing fluency on different types of thinking. Traditionally, it has been believed that processing fluency leads to a more superficial, intuitive processing of information, while disfluency leads to deep, analytical processing. Moreover, disfluency in some studies is considered as a desirable difficulty in learning.

Methods. We tested the idea that disfluency will contribute to greater success in completing tasks in 3 behavioral experiments aimed at studying logical reasoning (syllogisms), analytical (CRT) and creative problem solving (RAT). There were 4 experimental groups, in one of which tasks were presented in fluent font, and in the other three different types of disfluency were used: small font, illegible font and low contrast of font color with the background. We also asked the subjects to predict their success before completing the task and to assess their confidence in the answer after the task.

Results. Our hypotheses have not been confirmed in any experiment. Disfluency did not affect either the success of the tasks or the metacognitive judgments of the subjects.

Conclusions. We cannot say that disfluency would improve thinking. On the contrary, we can state on the example of our 3 experiments at once in conjunction with other studies that thinking processes are independent of the perceptual form of information, on how legible fonts are used. This result is consistent with other works devoted to the disfluency effect in the field of memory and learning.

Keywords: creative thinking, креативное мышление, reasoning, не-беглость, желательные трудности, desirable difficulties, disfluency, meta-reasoning, рассуждение, мета-рассуждение

Publication based on the results of: Cognitive processes in the information environment: phenomena and explanatory models (2025)