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Scientists working at the intersection of cognitive psychology and education have developed theoretically-grounded methods to help people learn. One important yet counterintuitive finding is that making information harder to learn - that is, creating desirable difficulties - benefits learners. Some studies suggest that simply presenting information in a difficult-to-read font could serve as a desirable difficulty and therefore promote learning. To address this possibility, we examined the extent to which Sans Forgetica, a newly developed font, improves memory performance - as the creators of the font claim. Across four experiments, we set out to replicate unpublished findings by the font's creators. Subjects read information in Sans Forgetica or Arial, and rated how difficult the information was to read (Experiment 1) or attempted to recall the information (Experiments 2-4). Although subjects rated Sans Forgetica as being more difficult to read than Arial, Sans Forgetica led to equivalent memory performance, and sometimes even impaired it. These findings suggest that although Sans Forgetica promotes a feeling of disfluency, it does not create a desirable difficulty or benefit memory.

Wixted, Mickes, and Fisher (this issue) take issue with the common trope that eyewitness memory is inherently unreliable. They draw on a large body of mock-crime research and a small number of field studies, which indicate that high-confidence eyewitness reports are usually accurate, at least when memory is uncontaminated and suitable interviewing procedures are used. We agree with the thrust of Wixted et al.'s argument and welcome their invitation to confront the mass underselling of eyewitnesses' potential reliability. Nevertheless, we argue that there is a comparable risk of overselling eyewitnesses' reliability. Wixted et al.'s reasoning implies that near-pristine conditions or uncontaminated memories are normative, but there are at least two good reasons to doubt this. First, psychological science does not yet offer a good understanding of how often and when eyewitness interviews might deviate from best practice in ways that compromise the accuracy of witnesses' reports. Second, witnesses may frequently be exposed to preinterview influences that could corrupt reports obtained in best-practice interviews.

When people receive descriptions or doctored photos of events that never happened, they often come to remember those events. But if people receive both a description and a doctored photo, does the order in which they receive the information matter? We asked people to consider a description and a doctored photograph of a childhood hot air balloon ride, and we varied which medium they saw first. People who saw a description first reported more false images and memories than did people who saw a photo first, a result that fits with an anchoring account of false childhood memories.