Re: Does font color/ style help you retain information?

Hi Mary :)

People tend to remember unusual things, or things that stand out from the 
norm.  This is good if you want to highlight particular words in a 
sentence, for example by writing certain words in red type to emphasise 
them.  But this will only help you remember the sentence if the words you 
highlight are the important ones.  

So if I asked you to learn the first sentence above, but I'd printed the 
words 'remember', 'unusual' and 'stand out' in red type, I'd expect you to 
remember it better than if I'd put the words 'people', 'things' and 'norm' 
in red.  This is because the words 'remember', 'unusual' and 'stand out' 
contain the basic meaning of the sentence.  The words 'people', 'things' 
and 'norm' don't make much sense on their own and don't help you remember 
what the sentence was about.

So only the most *important* words (the ones you really want people to 
remember and which are key to their understanding of the sentence) should 
be different from the rest of the text.  This might mean using bold text, 
or a different colour.  I haven't been able to find any research to show 
that using a different font (typeface) helps you remember, but I wouldn't 
be surprised if it did. 

Because people remember things that are different, it seems quite unlikely 
that if you printed an entire book in, say, red, it would make you remember 
it better.  If all the words were red, none of them would stand out.  
Peoples' brains are very good at *not* noticing things if they aren't 
important. So when you started reading the book, you might think "Hey, this 
is in red! That's unusual" but very soon you would not be aware of it any 
more because you would be concentrating on what the words actually meant.

If you are wondering which colours would help people remember the important 
words best, some recent research [1] suggests that people remember red and 
orange quite well, so those would be good colours to use.  The researchers 
also found that people don't remember yellow and pink so clearly, so you 
might want to avoid using those colours.   

People also remember things much better if they make sense, if they fit 
into the person's mental scheme of things.  So with the sentence "I went to 
the store to buy food, and the first thing I bought was tomatoes", you 
could try making the word 'tomatoes' appear in red, because everybody knows 
tomatoes are red.  Children are particularly aware of shapes and colours - 
it has been suggested that this is because their sense of 'meaning' is 
still developing and so they concentrate more on purely visual information 
(their visual system is already fully developed).  So, they might remember 
that there was a red word at the end of the sentence.  Then they can ask 
themselves "What would you buy at a store that's red?" "Tomatoes!"

Some people find this kind of technique very useful for remembering things 
or memorising text.  The important thing to remember is to use the same 
colour (or font) for the same word every time!  That way you are 
reinforcing the connection between the word and the colour each time, and 
the more often this happens, the better you will remember it.

Perhaps the last thing to say is that children are still developing their 
memory skills so if you were writing a book you might want to use the above 
tricks sparingly.  If there are several different colours/fonts being used 
in the text, children will probably find it very pretty, but they won't 
learn better!  Keep it simple and they will remember the stand-out words.


References:

[1]  MD de Fez, MJ Luque, P Capilla, J Perez-Carpinell, MA Diez:  "Colour 
memory matching analysed using different representation spaces".  Journal 
Of Optics-Nouvelle Revue D Optique 1998, vol 29, pp 287-297.

The following book is quite useful for learning how to make form and colour 
work for you as an aid to remembering information, and contains lots of 
useful facts about how memory actually works:

Buzan, Tony:  The Mind Map Book