What did your senior thesis ever do: CDY edition

Comic Sans gets a lot of crap. But hard-to-read fonts like Comic Sans and Bodoni may help students learn more, according to a new study in Cognition.By "a new study in Cognition," we mean Connor Diemand-Yauman's senior thesis.He may have been eliminated from the Amazing Race, but his senior thesis is starting to attract media attention. The psychology thesis involved testing the ability of students to memorize facts about "aliens." Some students were given information in 16-pt. black Arial, which is generally considered easy to read. Other students were given information in 12-pt. Comic Sans or 12-pt. Bodoni in 75 percent greyscale. They were then distracted for 15 minutes and tested on what they could remember.From the BBC:

Researchers found that, on average, those given the harder-to-read fonts actually recalled 14% more.They believe that presenting information in a way that is hard to digest means a person has to concentrate more, and this leads to "deeper processing" and then "better retrieval" afterwards.