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The Effect and the Efficiency Balance of Font Size and Font Color Change on the Human Memory in Chinese Vocabulary

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Engineering Psychology and Cognitive Ergonomics. Mental Workload, Human Physiology, and Human Energy (HCII 2020)

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Abstract

The study of reading memory mainly focuses on the language, cognitive and metacognitive skills that people must master, by which people are able to read and study. Little attention has been paid to how words themselves, the perceptual characteristics of words, affect comprehension and memory. In the research, perceptual characteristics were controlled by providing Chinese vocabulary in four different font sizes and two font colors which are experimented in 10 participants. The font sizes were 16pt, 20pt, 28pt, and 40pt; the font colors were red and black, respectively. Experiments were made to compare and measure the two aspects influence on human memory and efficiency balance. The experimental results showed that font size increasing was more effective in increasing memory scores than color-changing. In particular, compared with red words in 16pt, words in black of 40pt significantly increased the memory score. However, there was no significant difference in memory score between 20pt and 28pt black words. According to the experimental results and post-experiment interview, the results were discussed at the end of this paper.

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Correspondence to Jui-Wen Peng .

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Fu, TW., Peng, JW. (2020). The Effect and the Efficiency Balance of Font Size and Font Color Change on the Human Memory in Chinese Vocabulary. In: Harris, D., Li, WC. (eds) Engineering Psychology and Cognitive Ergonomics. Mental Workload, Human Physiology, and Human Energy. HCII 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12186. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49044-7_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49044-7_5

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-49044-7

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