The role of answer fluency and perceptual fluency in the monitoring and control of reasoning: Reply to Alter, Oppenheimer, and Epley (2013)

In this reply, we provide an analysis of Alter et al. (2013) response to our earlier paper (Thompson et al., 2013). In that paper, we reported difficulty in replicating Alter, Oppenheimer, Epley, and Eyre’s (2007) main finding, namely that a sense of disfluency produced by making stimuli difficult to perceive, increased accuracy on a variety of reasoning tasks. Alter, Oppenheimer, and Epley (2013) argue that we misunderstood the meaning of accuracy on these tasks, a claim that we reject. We argue and provide evidence that the tasks were not too difficult for our populations (such that no amount of “metacognitive unease” would promote correct responding) and point out that in many cases performance on our tasks was well above chance or on a par with Alter et al.’s (2007) participants. Finally, we reiterate our claim that the distinction between answer fluency (the ease with which an answer comes to mind) and perceptual fluency (the ease with which a problem can be read) is genuine, and argue that Thompson et al. (2013) provided evidence that these are distinct factors that have different downstream effects on cognitive processes.