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Illusions of familiarity
Abstract
Feelings of familiarity are not direct products of memory. Although prior experience of a stimulus can produce a feeling of familiarity, that feeling can also be aroused in the absence of prior experience if perceptual processing of the stimulus is fluent (e.g., B. W. Whittlesea et al, 1990). This suggests that feelings of familiarity arise through an unconscious inference about the source of processing fluency. The present experiments extend that conclusion. First, they show that a wide variety of feelings about the past are controlled by a fluency heuristic, including feelings about the meaning, pleasantness, duration, and recency of past events. Second, they demonstrate that the attribution process does not rely only on perceptual fluency, but can be influenced even more by the fluency of conceptual processing. Third, they show that although the fluency heuristic itself is simple, people's use of it is highly sophisticated and makes them robustly sensitive to the actual historical status of current events. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
... The present study aimed to address the following question: does the discrepancy between an expected word and its readability enhances or impair its memorability? We used an adaptation of the sentence stem paradigm (Whittlesea in J Exp Psycol 19:1235-1253, 1993 and manipulated the perceptual clarity of the words by introducing some Gaussian noise (Reber in Psycol Sci 9:45-48, 1998). The target words were semantically predictable or otherwise (conceptual fluency) or were easy or difficult to read (perceptual fluency). ...
... But, as the author stressed, the degree to which feelings of familiarity relied on the fluency of conceptual versus perceptual processing was unclear. It seems that the nature of what the subject felt (perceptual vs. conceptual fluency) "…depend [ed] only on what question the subject was predisposed to answer when encountering the item" (Whittlesea 1993(Whittlesea , p. 1244. In particular, "To sponsor a feeling of familiarity, the fluency of current processing need not be due to a normatively appropriate source, but it must feel as though it is" (p. ...
... The present study adopted the following suggestion: "[i]t seems likely…that the process of interpreting fluency, which results in the feeling of familiarity, was undertaken only when the fluency was surprising in the context" (Whittlesea 1993(Whittlesea , p. 1251. This idea has been taken up through what several authors have referred to as the discrepancy attribution hypothesis (Whittlesea 2002;Leboe 2000, 2003;Whittlesea and Williams 1998, 2001a, 2001b, which states that a feeling of familiarity can arise depending on the subjective perception of the gap between what is expected and what is perceived; for instance, it may be more fluent than expected. ...
The present study aimed to address the following question: does the discrepancy between an expected word and its readability enhances or impair its memorability? We used an adaptation of the sentence stem paradigm (Whittlesea in J Exp Psycol 19:1235-1253, 1993) and manipulated the perceptual clarity of the words by introducing some Gaussian noise (Reber in Psycol Sci 9:45-48, 1998). The target words were semantically predictable or otherwise (conceptual fluency) or were easy or difficult to read (perceptual fluency). The first experiment was conducted to ensure that the two manipulated factors had an impact on the readability of the words. In particular, results showed that when the words were written against a noisy background their predictability enhanced the judgement of readability. The second experiment aimed to test the hypothesis that recognition would be influenced by the discrepancy between conceptual and perceptual fluency. The results showed that with a noisy background, the predictability of the target words had an impact on recognition judgement; with a clear background, the effect on the recognition judgement was caused by the non-predictability of the target words. Conversely, confidence in judgement increased when the two factors went in the same direction, that is, predictability with clarity and non-predictability with low clarity. The results showed that (a) depending on the task, the effects of conceptual and perceptual fluency did not go in the same direction; (b) the kinds of fluency (conceptual and perceptual) were not independent; and (c) recognition judgements were affected by the gap between conceptual and perceptual fluency.
... The proposition that a bargain is less appropriate in store environments with high-differentiation can further be explained by the theory of conceptual fluency (De Bock et al., 2013;Whittlesea, 1993). Conceptual fluency results from a semantic association between context and target, causing the mental representation of the target to be easier to activate. ...
... The findings of Study 1 confirm that a bargain in a highdifferentiation store environment negatively impacts consumer reactions in a low store familiarity setting. A possible explanation can be found in the processing fluency theory (Schwarz, 2004;Whittlesea, 1993). Consumers who are not familiar with the store may deduce an 'image of cheapness' from short-term price reductions (Briggs and Smyth, 1967;McGoldrick, 2002), which is not consistent with the image they have on the basis of the store environment. ...
... Namely, we found that store affect is only significantly lower when a bargain is offered in a high-differentiation store environment compared to such an environment without a bargain. This finding is in line with processing 'disfluency' theory (Schwarz, 2004;Whittlesea, 1993). It is also consistent with findings in the Stimulus-Organism-Response literature, indicating that more stimuli is not always better (cf. ...
Two main types of value have been established in the retail literature: merchandise value based on the quality and price of a store's offerings and differentiation value based on the extent of atmospheric cues in the environment. However, it is not clear what happens when a store offers both types of value to a high degree. We investigate how offering a bargain (or price cut) affects consumer responses for high and low differentiation store environments. In two studies, using a simulated store environment in a behavioural laboratory, we find that the presence of bargains in a highly differentiated store environment negatively influences store affect and, in turn, approach behaviour. This effect, however, only holds true for low familiarity stores and can be explained by processing fluency theory. Consequently, retailers focusing on store environment differentiation should reconsider their use of bargains.
... We have seen that one way a causal theory of memory can be true while memory traces are as the prop theory sees them is for some state other than a memory trace (namely, a persisting one-off belief) to causally link a remembering to the event remembered. With that in mind, we should consider the thesis-popular in the contemporary scientific study of memorythat episodic remembering involves distinct, interacting components of recollection and feelings of familiarity (Bastin et al., 2019;Jacoby, Kelley, & Dywan, 1989;Whittlesea, 1993;Whittlesea & Williams, 2000;Yonelinas, 2002). Recollection is viewed as a process by which one generates detailed qualitative and spatial representations of past events (Bastin et al., 2019;Yonelinas, Aly, Wang, & Koen, 2010). ...
... A feeling of familiarity, by contrast, is a "feeling of oldness indicating that something has been previously experienced," and is not itself conceived of as bearing information about the object or event remembered-other than, perhaps, that it has been encountered previously (Bastin et al., 2019, p. 2). Despite its informational impoverishment, the feeling of familiarity has been called the "sin qua non of remembering"-that without which a mental process of representing the past seems only to be a bit of guessing or problem solving (Whittlesea, 1993(Whittlesea, , p. 1235. The idea that these two processes are distinct yet equally involved in ordinary acts of episodic remembering is now supported by multiple lines of research, including dissociations revealed in behavioral tasks (Whittlesea & Williams, 2000), dissociations in neuropsychological cases (Aggleton et al., 2000;Bastin et al., 2019), and neuroimaging indicating distinct neural substrates for each (Yonelinas, 2002). ...
... Building on the work of Jacoby et al. (1989), Whittlesea and colleagues (Whittlesea, 1993;Whittlesea, Jacoby, & Girard, 1990;Whittlesea & Williams, 2000) have shown that feelings of familiarity can be boosted by increasing the fluency of a stimulus, even in cases where the stimulus is not in fact familiar. In one of their experiments (numerous variations of which have been conducted over the years) participants were briefly shown a list of words followed by a target word. ...
Martin and Deutscher’s (1966) causal theory of remembering holds that a memory trace serves as a necessary causal link between any genuine episode of remembering and the event it enables one to recall. In recent years, the causal theory has come under fire from researchers across philosophy and cognitive science, who argue that results from the scientific study of memory are incompatible with the kinds of memory traces that Martin and Deutscher hold essential to remembering. Of special note, these critics observe, is that a single memory trace can be shaped by multiple past experiences. This appears to prevent traces from underwriting Martin and Deutscher’s distinction between remembering an event and merely forming an accurate representation of it. This paper accepts such criticisms of the standard causal theory and, through considering the phenomenon forgetting through repetition, raises several others. A substantially revised causal theory is then developed, compatible with the thesis that individual memory traces are shaped by multiple past experiences. The key strategy is to conceive of episodic remembering not as the simple retrieval and projection of a static memory trace, but as a complex quasi-inferential process that makes use of multiple forms of information and cues—“prop-like” memory traces included—in generating the experience known as episodic remembering. When remembering is understood as a multi-componential process, there are a variety of ways in which a representation of the past may be appropriately causally dependent upon a prior experience of the event remembered.
... Winkielman, Halberstadt, Fazendeiro, and Catty (2006) showed that the preference for prototypical faces extends to abstract visual patterns, indicating that the greater ease with which people process prototypical stimuli influences judgments of attractiveness. In the linguistic domain, sentence-final words that are preceded by a semantically predictive context are judged to be more pleasant than words preceded by a non-predictive context (Whittlesea, 1993). ...
... Because of this, naïve theories can be subject to misattribution or misinterpretation. For example, Whittlesea (1993) used visual masking or semantic context to manipulate the processing fluency of words presented on a screen. ...
... A listener's reliance on fluency versus other information can be influenced by a variety of factors. In experimental settings, greater task demands have been shown to increase participants' reliance on fluency when making judgments (Whittlesea, 1993). More generally, both low motivation and happy mood have also been linked to reliance on heuristic strategies, including fluency-based evaluation (Schwarz, 2004). ...
Negative attitudes toward non-native speakers of English are well-documented and have adverse impacts on English learners in a variety of settings. Recent research has proposed that (i) disfluent processing of accented speech (i.e., the metacognitive feeling of effort that accompanies perceiving and integrating information) and (ii) stereotypes and categories associated with specific accents both play a role in these negative attitudes. Previous research has also shown that comprehension of accented speech becomes more accurate over time as listeners perceptually adapt to unfamiliar speech patterns. This dissertation tests the hypothesis that adaptation through listening experience leads to less effortful processing and thereby more positive attitudes, and more broadly investigates the relationship among processing fluency, the subjective perception of fluency, and attitudes toward a speaker with a non-native accent. In two experiments, participants listened to and transcribed sentences recorded by a speaker in either a non-native or native guise. The non-native accent was selected, based on pre-tests, to be difficult to categorize (e.g., as a native speaker of Spanish), in order to minimize attitude stereotypes associated with judgments of ethnicity or nationality and better isolate the influence of processing fluency. In Experiment 1, all participants listened to the sentences in clear audio. In Experiment 2, participants listened to sentences either in clear audio or mixed with speech-shaped noise, which provided an additional manipulation of processing fluency. Objective fluency was assessed using transcription accuracy in both experiments, in addition to pupil dilation during listening and transcription time in Experiment 1. Subjective fluency and attitudes toward the speaker on the dimensions of warmth, competence, and social closeness were measured at intervals using scale-response questions. The results show that pupil dilation and transcription time decrease with experience with a non-native accent, indicating improved objective processing fluency, though transcription accuracy results unexpectedly did not show evidence for adaptation to the accent. The results also provide no evidence that listeners’ subjective perception of fluency or attitudes toward the speaker change as objective fluency improves. Analysis of the relationship between these variables indicates that listeners’ perception of effort in comprehending non-native accented speech is more closely related to their attitudes and social evaluations of the speaker, rather than to objective processing effort. This dissertation adds two main contributions to research on the comprehension of and attitudes toward non-native speakers. First, it provides evidence that comprehension of non-native accented speech becomes easier over time using a physiological measure (pupil dilation) in addition to behavioral measures. Second, by comparing objective fluency, subjective fluency, and attitudes in the same task, it shows that the perception of effort does not necessarily reflect objective effort in comprehending accented speech, but instead appears to be associated with listeners’ social judgments. For listeners who experience difficulty understanding non-native accented speech, comprehension is likely to get easier in a short period of time as their cognitive systems adapt to unfamiliar speech patterns. The more a listener recognizes this increased ease, the more that ease may lead to improved attitudes toward the speaker.
... Processing fluency impacts a large variety of human judgments: Fluently processed stimuli are believed to be more familiar (e.g., Jacoby & Whitehouse, 1989;Whittlesea, 1993), more frequent (e.g., Greifeneder & Bless, 2007;Tversky & Kahneman, 1973), of higher quality (e. g., Greifeneder et al., 2010;Oppenheimer, 2006), and are generally preferred (e.g., Reber, Winkielman, & Schwarz, 1998) to stimuli that are disfluently processed (for reviews, see Greifeneder, Bless, & Pham, 2011;Reber & Greifeneder, 2017;Schwarz, 2004a;Schwarz & Clore, 2007). Most importantly for the present research, they are more likely believed to be true rather than false (e.g., Begg et al., 1992;Reber & Schwarz, 1999; for reviews, see Alter & Oppenheimer, 2009;Dechêne et al., 2010). ...
... Given these findings, one might argue that the feeling of processing ease itself inherently entails the meaning of familiarity, frequency, quality, truth, and so on. Contrasting this idea, however, prior research indicates that fluency is initially an unspecific feeling of processing ease or difficulty (e.g., Jacoby, Kelley, & Dywan, 1989;Whittlesea, 1993;Whittlesea & Williams, 2000). Once people look for a cause of this unspecific feeling, they attribute it to a specific source (attribution account), for example, to the truth status of some piece of information such as "Sivas is in Greece." ...
... defined in the present contribution pertains to the within-item truth status. According to Whittlesea andWilliams (2001a, 2001b), inconsistency as manipulated in Experiment 4 should not produce an incoherent processing experience, because the disfluent processing fits the obvious semantic inconsistency. ...
Information is more likely believed to be true when it feels easy rather than difficult to process. An ecological learning explanation for this fluency-truth effect implicitly or explicitly presumes that truth and fluency are positively associated. Specifically, true information may be easier to process than false information and individuals may reverse this link in their truth judgments. The current research investigates the important but so far untested precondition of the learning explanation for the fluency-truth effect. In particular, five experiments (total N = 712) test whether participants experience information known to be true as easier to process than information known to be false. Participants in Experiment 1a judged true statements easier to read than false statements. Experiment 1b was a preregistered direct replication with a large sample and again found increased legibility for true statements-importantly, however, this was not the case for statements for which the truth status was unknown. Experiment 1b thereby shows that it is not the actual truth or falsehood of information but the believed truth or falsehood that is associated with processing fluency. In Experiment 2, true calculations were rated as easier to read than false calculations. Participants in Experiment 3 judged it easier to listen to calculations generally known to be true than to calculations generally known to be false. Experiment 4 shows an effect of truth on processing fluency independent of statement familiarity. Discussion centers on the current explanation for the fluency-truth effect and the validity of processing fluency as a cue in truth judgments.
... First, the fluency of information processing explains the moderating mechanism of stereotypes. Conceptual fluency is the ease with which individuals can analyze and recognize semantics during information processing [32]. Activation spread theory suggests that individuals classify concepts based on their semantic similarity to form different semantic networks and store them in memory. ...
... Activation spread theory suggests that individuals classify concepts based on their semantic similarity to form different semantic networks and store them in memory. When a concept in a certain network is activated, others are also activated, forming an activation spread [32]. The higher the semantic similarity between concepts, the more easily the activation spreads. ...
From the perspective of entrepreneurs’ perception of a business environment (EPBE), this study explores the mechanism of EPBE on enterprise innovation with regional stereotypes. Data from 358 entrepreneur questionnaires in China were tested by using a structural equation model. The results showed that the two dimensions of EPBE—entrepreneurs’ perception of the government environment (EPGE) and entrepreneurs’ perception of the factor environment (EPFE)—are significantly positively correlated with enterprise innovation, willingness–ability fit (WAF) plays a mediating role between EPBE and enterprise innovation, a warm impression has a greater positive moderating effect on the relationship between EPGE and enterprise innovation, and a competence impression has a greater positive moderating effect on the relationship between EPFE and enterprise innovation. These research findings expand the ideas of research on business environment optimization and enterprise innovation and provide theoretical references for stimulating enterprise innovation.
... Hoorens and Bruckmüller (2015) suggested that the more-credible effect is a fluency effect. That is, they proposed that it arises because "more than" statements are easier to process than "less than" statements, and that this metacognitive experience of ease forms the basis for judgments of quality, agreement, and truth (e.g., Alter & Oppenheimer, 2009;Hasher et al., 1977;Reber, 2016;Silva et al., 2017;Whittlesea, 1993). ...
... and the experimental design only included a warning for the "less than" condition rather than rather than a factorial 2 (comparative) x 2 (warning condition) structure. More importantly, an effect of warning is indirect support for a fluency explanation: more direct evidence would require finding that "more than" statements are easier to process than "less than" statements -as indexed by some objective measure such as reading time (e.g., Whittlesea, 1993) -and, ideally, that this difference in ease of processing mediates the effect of comparative on people's agreement with the statement. ...
People are more likely to endorse statements of the form "A is more than B" than those of the form "B is less than A", even though the ordinal relationship being described is identical in both cases -– a result I dub the "more-credible" effect. This paper reports 9 experiments (total N = 5643) that probe the generality and basis for this effect. Studies 1–4 replicate the effect for comparative statements relating to environmental change and sustainable behaviours, finding that it is robust to changes in participant population, experimental design, response formats and data analysis strategy. However, it does not generalize to all stimulus sets. Studies 5–9 test the proposition that the effect is based on the greater ease of processing "more than" statements. I find no meaningful effect of warning people not to base their judgments on the fluency of the sentences (Studies 5 and 6), but do find associations between comparative language, credibility, and processing time: when the more-credible effect manifests, the more-than statements are read more quickly than the less-than statements, and this difference partly mediates the effect of comparative on agreement with the statements; in contrast, for a set of comparisons for which changes in the more/less framing did not affect truth judgments, there was no meaningful difference in the time taken to read the more- and less-than versions of the statements. Taken together, these results highlight the importance of comparative language in shaping the credibility of important socio-political messages, and provide some limited support for the idea that the effect of language choice is partly due to differences in how easily the statements can be processed -– although other mechanisms are also likely to be at work.
... However, much less is known about valence recognition for stimuli that are not consciously identifiable due to a visual mask, and the underlying mechanisms are not well understood. However, given that familiarity is typically associated with safety and positive affect (Reber et al., 1998;Westerman et al., 2015;Whittlesea, 1993;Winkielman et al., 2003), and that this link is bidirectional (Claypool et al., 2008;Corneille et al., 2005) one might expect the positive images would be rated as more familiar than the negative images-the opposite of what was found by . In addition, the images that were used in their study were obtained from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS; Lang et al., 2005). ...
... Importantly, these findings were independent of arousal, providing novel evidence that valence alone can be utilized to make judgments about the familiarity of an image even if the image cannot be identified. Although this finding is contrary to a previously reported experiment using similar methods , our results are consistent with a multitude of studies that have shown a strong link between familiarity and positive affect (Monin, 2003;Reber et al., 1998;Westerman et al., 2015;Whittlesea, 1993;Winkielman et al., 2003). In fact, the present result could be viewed as the flip side of the mere exposure effect (Zajonc, 1968). ...
Research using the Recognition Without Identification paradigm (Cleary & Greene, 2000, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 26[4], 1063-1069; Peynircioǧlu, 1990, Journal of Memory and Language, 29, 493-500) has found that participants can discriminate between old and new stimuli even when the stimuli are obscured to a degree that they are unidentifiable. This methodology has been adapted in the past by using heavily obscured threatening and nonthreatening images and asking participants to try to identify each image followed by a familiarity rating of the image. Past results showed that threatening images that were not able to be identified were rated as more familiar than nonthreatening images that were not able to be identified (Cleary et al., 2013, Memory & Cognition, 41, 989-999). The current study used a similar methodology to explore the possibility that a sense of familiarity can serve to guide our attention toward potential threats in the environment. However, contrary to earlier results, we found that positive images were rated as more familiar than negative images. This pattern was found with both identified and unidentified images and was replicated across five experiments. The current findings are consistent with the view that feelings of positivity and familiarity are closely linked (e.g., de Vries et al., 2010, Psychological Science, 21[3], 321-328; Garcia-Marques et al., 2004, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 30, 585-593; Monin, 2003, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85[6], 1035-1048).
... Multiple factors can affect the highly subjective feelings of ease and fluency, of which there are multiple types, including perceptual fluency, which refers to the perceived ease with the physical identity and form of a stimulus (Jacoby, Woloshyn and Kelley, 1989), conceptual fluency, which means the consumer's perception of feeling at ease or fluency with the meaning and associations of a stimulus (e.g., Whittlesea, 1993), and linguistic fluency, which explains the ease of language processing (Mcglone and Tofighbakhsh, 2000;Alter and Oppenheimer, 2006). A study by Mcglone and Tofighbakhsh (2000) focussed on linguistic fluency, demonstrating that individuals are more likely to believe aphorisms when they can rhyme (e.g. ...
... Drawing from literature on processing fluency (Whittlesea, 1993;Lee and Labroo, 2004), Online Experiment 3 examined the role of mediation, identifying processing fluency as an important mechanism that underlies the impact of maximisers on consumer's food product evaluations, intention to purchase and willingness to recommend. This finding, combined with other results in this thesis, collectively suggests that processing fluency appears to be mediating the impact of maximiser on the consumer's product evaluation. ...
This thesis explores the use and effects of maximisers when included within Health and Nutrition (H&N) claims on food product packaging, with direct relevance for industry practice. Four separate studies were carried out in support of this thesis, one field study and three online experimental studies. The effects of the maximiser language device were investigated through an online field experiment, conducted through the Facebook Ads Manager platform, with the results demonstrating that the use of maximisers has a positive effect on product likeability among Facebook users. The first online experimental study then demonstrated the informality features of maximisers, and highlighted the importance of consumer perceived congruence bet ween the language used in advertising a product and the retail environment in which the product is encountered. Results from this study showed that the used of maximisers in H&N claims has a positive direct effect on product likeability. The second online experimental study extended on the concept of perceived congruence from the first online study, investigating the congruence between the use of language and customer comments and reviews, and its effect on perceptions of and purchase intentions towards a product. The study demonstrated the sincerity and affirmation features of maximisers, and showed the interaction of these features with online reviews, with the presence of maximisers having a moderating influence of product perceptions when bad reviews are present. The third and final online experimental study tested the effect of maximisers in a realistic setting, investigating the effects of cognitive load on evaluations of and purchase intentions towards a product. The findings showed maximisers work effectively when consumers are cognitively available, with a reversed effect apparent when consumers are subjected to a high cognitive load. The findings from the experimental studies have potential for impact in industry practice in the marketing and advertising of food products, and for the design of food packaging, as well as for policy-makers aiming to protect consumers and consumer interests related to food advertising.
... For example, a variety of perceptual characteristics of stimuli, such as high figure-background contrast, long exposure time, and simple repetition, form priming, facilitate low-level processing and increase perceptual fluency, or the ease of identifying the physical identity of stimuli (e.g., Jacoby & Dallas, 1981;Roediger, 1990). Facilitating high-level processing through, for example, exposure to semantically related concepts, context congruity and rhythm, is accompanied by conceptual fluency or the ease of mental operations related to meaning and semantics (Whittlesea, 1993;Winkielman et al., 2003). To the present time it is not clear whether experiences promoted by different fluency sources are uniform or differ in a subjective experience level. ...
... Морошкина. Перцептивная и концептуальная беглость 153 Topolinski & Reber, 2010;Hansen et al., 2008) and familiarity judgments (Whittlesea, 1993). The opposite effects were registered much less often: it was shown that conceptual fluency impacts noise judgments (Jacoby et al., 1988), and judgments of clarifying (Whittlesea et al., 1990: Experiment 4); there is also an effect of semantic priming on liking judgments when exposure to the target item was limited to precognitive level (Labroo et al., 2008). ...
The heuristic of information processing fluency plays an important role in making judgments. Some sources of processing fluency can be relevant or irrelevant to the content of a judgment. In this study, we aim to check whether individuals can distinguish different sources of fluency or fluency has a general effect on judgments. We used an artificial grammar learning paradigm (AGL) and tested the effects of different fluency sources (grammaticality and perceptual noise) on the judgment of grammaticality or of subjective ease of reading. It was found that both grammaticality and perceptual noise affected grammaticality judgements: the grammatical and the less noisy strings were evaluated more often as grammatical. However, only the perceptual noise affected judgments of subjective ease of reading. The results obtained provide evidence that fluency may contribute to the effects of implicit learning. It is possible that the processing fluency heuristic is the additional factor of judgement in the lack of explicit knowledge. Perhaps, perceptual noise provided almost complete explicit information for judgment of ease of reading; hence there was no need for additional heuristics. Another possible explanation is that perceptual fluency sources affect the early stages of information processing in a mandatory manner, unlike the conceptual ones. Overall, results are better explained by the non-specificity fluency hypothesis supporting the impossibility to distinguish between different fluency sources.
... FOF arises when the current task is closely tied to previous experiences or when participants attribute the fluency on the current task to prior experiences (Efklides, 2006;Whittlesea, 1993). The current task can be an exact repetition or semantically related to prior tasks. ...
... It is worth noting that the lack of association between FOF and pre-test scores does not mean that the measure of FOF was nonreliable. FOF is the product of a non-analytic inferential process and based on experiences rather than knowledge (Whittlesea, 1993). ...
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The feelings of difficulty and familiarity (FOD and FOF) are two types of metacognitive experiences. Both may influence student engagement and the application of metacognitive strategies, but these relationships are not well understood, in part because many studies have relied on self-report measures of behaviors that may not accurately reflect students’ actual behaviors. In this study, FOD and FOF were related to objective measures of off-task behaviors and metacognitive strategies. These measures were extracted from 88 sixth graders’ action logs within a computer-based learning environment known as Betty’s Brain. Pre- and post-tests were administered to assess learning. Results reveal that high-FOD students showed more off-task behaviors and fewer strategic behaviors than low-FOD students, particularly when this difference was measured in terms of the frequency (as opposed to proportion) of strategic behaviors. FOF was not associated with off-task behaviors and metacognitive strategies but emerged as a moderator in the relationship between FOD and learning gains. Low-FOD students learned more than high-FOD students in the low-FOF group, but such a difference was not found in the high-FOF group.
... The logic is that because previous exposure to an item generally enhances processing fluency, people learn to interpret the feeling associated with fluency as a sign of prior encounter with a stimulus. This attribution of fluency to memory gives rise to the familiarity experience (Jacoby & Dallas, 1981;Kelley & Rhodes, 2002;Whittlesea, 1993). According to this attributional theory, several steps have to be completed for a feeling of familiarity to occur: (1) participants have to learn that fluency is a cue that can be used to inform memory judgments, (2) they have to experience a feeling of fluency when processing a stimulus, and (3) they have to attribute the feeling of fluency to their memory which implies deciding whether fluency can accurately inform memory judgments in a specific context (for an overview, see also Bastin et al., 2019). ...
... Specifically, we do not know whether these metacognitive changes depend on the task's characteristics or on the phenomenology associated with the feeling of fluency. Indeed, it is now well-established that enhanced processing fluency can occur at various levels of cognitive operation, such as perceptual (Jacoby & Whitehouse, 1989), conceptual (Whittlesea, 1993), lexical (Whittlesea & Williams, 2000), or motor (Topolinski, 2012). To date, however, only conceptual and perceptual fluency has been explored in amnesia. ...
The present study examined the evolution observed in amnesic patients’ use of motor fluency when making recognition memory decisions. In this experiment, 9 patients with amnesia and 18 matched controls were presented with two recognition memory tasks composed of 3 types of items: (1) natural words, (2) nonwords difficult to pronounce, and (3) nonwords easy to pronounce, the latter having been shown to be processed in a surprisingly fluent manner as long as participants can articulate them at a subvocal level (i.e., oral motor fluency). Our results provide evidence that the motor‐movement manipulation was successful to induce a fluency effect. More specifically, data revealed that both amnesic patients and control participants showed a pattern of response consistent with the use of fluency as a cue to memory for studied items. However, only control participants relied on fluency to increase their rate of “yes” responses for unstudied items. These results suggest that patients with amnesia set a more conservative response criterion before relying on oral motor fluency, showing a pattern consistent with the idea that fluency is only used as a cue to memory when it exceeds a certain threshold. These findings are discussed in terms of adaptative metacognition strategies implemented by amnesic patients to reduce fluency‐based memory errors as well as in terms of the variations that seem to occur in these strategies depending on the type of fluency that is experienced.
... Some evidence suggests that recognition false alarms can be induced by enhancing processing fluency (e.g., via masked priming) of items that have not been studied in an earlier phase of an experiment. The unexpected increase in fluency causes participants to endorse those fluent items as old, regardless of their true study status (Jacoby & Whitehouse, 1989;Johnston et al., 1985;Whittlesea, 1993;Whittlesea & Williams, 2000). ...
... Recent research has shown that fluency-based inaccurate familiarity can trigger a similar brain mechanism to that which produces accurate familiarity (Dew & Cabeza, 2013;Gomes et al., 2019;. One possibility could be that participants experienced enhanced perceptual fluency during the processing of certain novel pictures, which was then used as a cue for distinguishing old from new items (Johnston et al., 1985;Whittlesea, 1993). In order to test if perceptual fluency could partly explain the pupillometric similarity between F and FA responses, we computed the BOLAR index (an indicator of image similarity; see Methods) for every FA and CR image and for all participants. ...
Pupillometry, the measurement of pupil diameter, has become increasingly popular as a tool to investigate human memory. It has long been accepted that the pupil is able to distinguish familiar from completely novel items, a phenomenon known as "pupil old/new effect". Surprisingly, most pupillometric studies on the pupil old/new effect tend to disregard the possibility that the pupillary response to familiarity memory may not be entirely exclusive. Here, we investigated whether the pupillary response to old items correctly judged familiar (hits; accurate familiarity) can be differentiated from the pupillary response to new items wrongly judged familiar (false alarms; inaccurate familiarity). We found no evidence that the two processes could be isolated, as both accurate and inaccurate familiarity showed nearly identical mean and across-time pupillary responses. However, both familiarity hits and false alarms showed pupillary responses unequivocally distinct from those observed during either recollection or novelty detection, which suggests that the pupil measure of familiarity hits and/or false alarms was sufficiently sensitive. The pupillary response to false alarms may have been partially driven by perceptual fluency, since novel objects incorrectly judged to be old (i.e., false alarms) showed a higher degree of similarity to studied images than items correctly judged as novel (i.e., correct rejections). Thus, our results suggest that pupil dilation may not be able to distinguish accurate from inaccurate familiarity using standard recognition memory paradigms, and they also suggest that the pupillary response during familiarity feelings may also partly reflect perceptual fluency.
... Ces résultats seraient dus à un sentiment de fluence : les mots commençants par la lettre « k » arrivaient de manière plus fluente à l'esprit comparativement à des mots dont la lettre « k » était en troisième position. D'autres recherches ont montré que la fluence pouvait influencer les processus d'évaluation (Reber et al., 1998), de familiarité (Whittlesea, 1993), de jugements de vérité (Hasher et al., 1977 ;Unkelbach & Greifeneder, 2018) ou encore de perception d'équité (Greifeneder et al., 2011). L'effet du sentiment de fluence pourrait s'expliquer par le fait que lorsque nous souhaitons estimer certains construits non directement accessibles (dits construits distaux), nous aurions tendance à nous baser sur des construits plus accessibles (dits construits proximaux). ...
La comparaison sociale est l’un des processus les plus omniprésents dans notre quotidien. De nombreux travaux se sont intéressés à la manière dont ces processus de comparaison sociale pouvaient influencer la perception de soi. Néanmoins, il n’existe, à notre connaissance, que peu de recherches s’étant intéressées à la potentielle influence des émotions sur de tels processus. Nous défendons ici la thèse selon laquelle la prise en compte de l’état émotionnel a priori, et plus précisément un état de joie, permettrait de mieux comprendre les effets que peuvent avoir des processus de comparaison sociale sur la perception de soi. Dans une première série d’études, nous observons un effet de contraste en condition d’état émotionnel neutre qui se réduit et tend vers un effet d’assimilation en condition de joie. Dans une seconde série d’études, nous avons commencé à investiguer les potentiels mécanismes sous-jacents à l’effet précédemment évoqué. En somme, ces travaux de thèse peuvent être considérés comme essentiels, du fait que nous soyons au quotidien confrontés à un vécu émotionnel, ainsi qu’à un grand nombre de situations de comparaisons sociales.
... Finally, this study observed the ease of processing using an objective measure (i.e., memory recall) but did not account for other processes that are also fluent in processing hierarchal social information. Most researchers agree that the higher ease of processing influences various evaluations, such as liking and familiarity (Forster, Gerger, & Leder, 2015;Whittlesea, 1993). Therefore, future research should document levels of subjective fluency by asking how much participants liked the organogram, how familiar the organogram was relative to their social rank in the real world, and to what extent they think that their self-referential biases influenced memory performance. ...
The overarching aim of the work reported in this thesis is to build on the current research investigating the psychological and social processes in mental health disorders; in particular the socio-cognitive affective processing in depression across the lifespan. Depression risk is prevalent amongst adolescents, and there has been considerable research interest focusing on building a clear profile of the mechanisms of depression based on adult models. Here, I address these mechanisms and also integrate evolutionary principles to help better understand why depression may have evolved as an adaptive process involving elevated sensitivity to socially threatening information, negative self-referential processing biases, and behaviours associated with mitigating low social-rank status. Chapter 1 introduces the reader to depression and current theoretical frameworks relevant to social processing. Depression risk is then discussed, with a particular focus on adolescence as a sensitive period for both social development and depression vulnerability. Chapter 2 investigates how sensitivity to affectively-laden social information can impact the cognitive systems needed for everyday functioning, with a focus on cognitive control. Chapter 3 focuses on negative biases in the construction of the social self in adolescents at risk versus lower risk of developing depression. Chapter 4 takes a data-driven approach to investigate the relational social values that are important for social inclusivity. Then, further analysis looks at how these social values change as a function of age and mood. Chapter 5 investigates how hierarchical social information might influence memory, using a fully mature cognitive system (i.e. non-depressed adults). Finally, Chapter 6 integrates the evidence from Chapters 2-5 and provides a general discussion about the social processes in adolescents at risk of developing depression.
... Owing to semantic priming, the higher the item-inherent consistency with any one of the activated schemas, the more metamemory judgments of item memory should increase. This may be because items with high item-inherent consistency may be more conceptually fluent (Alter & Oppenheimer, 2009;Whittlesea, 1993; or more familiar, e.g., Metcalfe, 1993;Reder, 1987;Schwartz, 1994) and/or may trigger a stronger belief that consistency benefits memory (Schaper et al., 2019a(Schaper et al., , 2022a, which should enhance JOLs. ...
Item memory and source memory are different aspects of episodic remembering. To investigate metamemory differences between them, the authors assessed systematic differences between predictions of item memory via Judgments of Learning (JOLs) and source memory via Judgments of Source (JOSs). Schema-based expectations affect JOLs and JOSs differently: Judgments are higher for expected source-item pairs (e.g., "nightstand in the bedroom") than unexpected pairs (e.g., "bed in the bathroom"), but this expectancy effect is stronger on JOSs than JOLs (Schaper et al., 2019b). The current study tested theoretical underpinnings of this difference. Due to semantic priming, JOLs should be influenced by the consistency between an item and any of the schemas activated at study. JOSs, however, should be influenced by the (in)consistency between an item and its actual source. In three experiments, source-item pairs varied in strength of consistency and inconsistency. Participants provided item-wise JOLs and JOSs. Regardless of an items' actual source, JOLs were higher the more consistent an item was with any of the source schemas, but only if that schema was activated by occurring as a source at study. JOLs were also biased by the actual source: JOLs were lower the more inconsistent an item was with its actual source. By contrast, JOSs were primarily influenced by an item's (in)consistency with its actual source (positively for consistency, negatively for inconsistency). Thus, participants metacognitively differentiated item memory and source memory. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
... This consistency will make its processing more fluent (Jacoby & Dallas, 1981). Second, a more fluent processing would lead to a positive evaluation of the stimulus (also known as the "Hedonic Fluency Model", Bornstein & D'Agostino, 1994;Schwarz, Bless, & Bohner, 1991;Whittlesea, 1993;Whittlesea & Williams, 2001;Reber, Schwarz, & Winkielman, 2004;Clore & Huntsinger, 2007;Rotteveel & Phaf, 2007;Clore & Palmer, 2009;Winkielman et al., 2003, see Fig. 1). The better the sensory neural system suits the current sensory input, the more positive the affective response will be. ...
Phenomena such as engagement, attention and curiosity rely heavily on the “optimal-level of stimulation (or arousal)” model, which suggests they are driven by stimuli being neither too simple nor too complex. Two points often overlooked in psychology are that each stimulus is simultaneously processed with its context, and that a stimulus complexity is relative to an individual’s cognitive resources to process it. According to the “optimal-level of stimulation” model, while familiar contexts may decrease the overall stimulation and favour exploration of novelty, a novel context may increase the overall stimulation and favour preference for familiarity. In order to stay closer to their optimum when stimulation is getting too high or too low, individuals can explore other stimuli, adopt a different processing style or be creative. The need and the ability to adopt such strategies will depend upon the cognitive resources available, which can be affected by contextual stimulation and by other factors such as age, mood or arousability. Drawing on empirical research in cognitive and developmental psychology, we provide here an updated “optimal-level of stimulation” model, which is holistic and coherent with previous literature. Once taken into account the role of contextual stimulation as well as the diverse factors influencing internal cognitive resources, such model fits with and enriches other existing theories related to exploratory behaviors. By doing so, it provides a useful framework to investigate proximate explanations underlying learning and cognitive development, and to develop future interventions related, for example, to eating, and learning disorders.
... In addition to congruity in valence or arousal [10], atmospheric cues can also be congruent based on their semantic associations (e.g., warm/cool color/scent [13]); soft/hard music/flooring [9]; feminine/masculine scent/touch [14]; Christmas music/Christmas scent [30]). The positive effect of semantic congruity between atmospheric cues can be explained by the theory of conceptual fluency [34,35]. Atmospheric cues can obtain semantic meaning [14], and these semantic associations can lead to conceptual fluency because the associated concepts are more accessible in the consumer's mind. ...
Ambient light is inherent in the store environment, making research on the interaction effects between light and other atmospheric cues crucial to understanding how the store environment can affect consumers. This study extends existing research on multisensory congruity effects between atmospheric cues by examining whether multiple sensory associations (i.e., warmth and brightness) of ambient cues (i.e., light and scent) must match to create positive effects on consumer evaluations and behavior or whether a match of only one sensory association is sufficient. Previous research operationalized multisensory congruity primarily via the match on one specific association; however, the results of our two studies show that matching ambient light and scent (compared to a mismatch between the stimuli or compared to only one ambient cue) only led to enhanced evaluations and approach behavior when these stimuli were matched on both their perceived association with a warm or cold temperature and with a dim or bright illuminance level. Our research supports the importance of perceiving the store environment holistically and suggests that the description and selection of an atmospheric cue to create positive congruity effects on consumer evaluations and behavior is quite complex.
... Stereotypes are inaccurate beliefs about qualities or abilities shared by certain groups of people or collectives, which contribute to setting expectations about their behaviour (Tay et al. 2014). One of the theories that explain the existence of stereotypes is the theory of fluency, which proposes that when subjects are repeatedly exposed to a stimulus, it is stored in memory, so that the next time they re-experience it, it will familiar to them and they will process it more easily (Whittlesea 1993). Designing robots to appear feminine or masculine is very easy, as any gender attribution, such as the tone of voice, already triggers users to believe that it is a male or female robot (Dryer 1999;Tay et al. 2014). ...
The Covid-19 pandemic has stimulated the use of social robots in front-office services. However, some initial applications yielded disappointing results, as managers were unaware of the level of development of the robots’ artificial intelligence systems. This study proposes to adapt the Almere model to estimate the technological acceptance of service robots, which express their gender and personality, whilst assisting consumers. A 2 × 2 (two genders vs. two personalities) between-subjects experiment was conducted with 219 participants. Model estimation with Structural Equation Modelling confirmed seven out of eight hypotheses, and all four scenarios were estimated with Ordinary Least Squares, showing that robot gender and personality affected their technological acceptance.
... Non-probative but related photos also increase perceived credibility of both expert and non-expert witnesses in forensic contexts (Derksen et al., 2020;Sanson et al., 2020), increase the propensity for people to misremember past events (Cardwell et al., 2016;Wade et al., 2002), and increase 'likes' and 'shares' in a social media environment (Fenn et al., 2019). The existing empirical research suggests that truthiness occurs throughout a variety of judgment contexts because non-probative but related photos make claims feel subjectively easier to process (i.e., increase processing fluency) compared to when no photo is present (e.g., Jacoby & Dallas, 1981;Whittlesea, 1993). According to fluency-based accounts, a photo may help people picture and process a claim more easily (Cardwell et al., 2017;Schwarz & Newman, 2017). ...
When semantically-related photos appear with true-or-false trivia claims, people more often rate the claims as true compared to when photos are absent-truthiness. This occurs even when the photos lack information useful for assessing veracity. We tested whether truthiness changed in magnitude as a function of participants' age in a diverse sample using materials appropriate for all ages. We tested participants (N = 414; Age range = 3-87 years) in two culturally diverse environments: a community science center (First language: English (61.4%); Mandarin/Cantonese (11.6%); Spanish (6%), other (21%); ethnicity: unreported) and a psychology lab (First language: English (64.4%); Punjabi (9.8%); Mandarin/Cantonese (7.4%); other (18.4%); ethnicity: Caucasian (38%); South Asian (30.7%); Asian (22.7%); other/unreported (8.6%). Participants rated trivia claims as true or false. Half the claims appeared with a semantically related photo, and half appeared without a photo. Results showed that participants of all ages more often rated claims as true when claims appeared with a photo; however, this truthiness effect was stable across the lifespan. If truthiness age differences exist, they are likely negligible in the general population. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
... Alternatively, it has been shown that people process a stimulus more quickly and easily-i.e., with greater fluency-if they have perceived it recently (Whittlesea, 1993;Whittlesea & Williams, 2001). Let mental state F be a state that is caused by one's perceiving of S and that causes one to be fluent for stimulus S. Suppose now that I recently turned off the stove and am trying to remember whether I have done so. ...
The (dis)continuism debate in the philosophy and cognitive science of memory concerns whether remembering is continuous with episodic future thought and episodic counterfactual thought in being a form of constructive imagining. I argue that settling that dispute will hinge on whether the memory traces (or "engrams") that support remembering impose arational, perception-like constraints that are too strong for remembering to constitute a kind of constructive imagining. In exploring that question, I articulate two conceptions of memory traces-the replay theory and the prop theory-that return conflicting answers to whether remembering is constructive imagining. The prop theory's vision of traces is suggestive of continuism, while the replay theory's is a natural fit for discontinuism. Which view of traces is in fact correct remains undetermined by current empirical work. Nevertheless, it may already be possible to reach a compromise in the (dis)continuism debate, through the development of a conciliatory continuist causal theory. This view-only outlined here-accepts the continuism-friendly prop theory of traces, while still requiring that genuine remembering fulfills an appropriate causation condition, as required by the kinds of causal theories of remembering typically favored by discontinuists.
... The mere exposure effect has since been shown in several modalities: visual (Bornstein, 1989;Zajonc, 1968Zajonc, , 2001, auditory (Heingartner & Hall, 1974;Wilson, 1979), olfactory (Balogh & Porter, 1986;Cain & Johnson, 1978), and gustatory (Crandall, 1985;Pliner, 1982). According to the hedonic fluency model (Bornstein & D'Agostino, 1994), this preference for familiarity results from a more fluent processing of familiar stimuli (Clore & Huntsinger, 2007;Clore & Palmer, 2009;Reber et al., 2004;Rotteveel & Phaf, 2007;Schwarz et al., 1991;Whittlesea, 1993;Whittlesea & Williams, 2001;Winkielman et al., 2003). ...
Exploration is one of the most powerful behaviours that drive learning from infancy to adulthood. The aim of the current study was to examine the role of novelty and subjective preference in visual exploration. To do this, we combined a visual exploration task with a subjective evaluation task, presenting novel and familiar pictures. The first goal was to ascertain whether, as demonstrated in babies, short habituation favors visual exploration of familiarity, whereas longer habituation leads to an exploration of novelty. The second goal was to evaluate the influence of familiarization on participants’ subjective evaluation of the stimuli. When presented with novel and very familiar stimuli, participants explored the novel stimuli more. In line with the optimal-level of arousal model, participants showed more positive evaluations of the semi-familiar stimuli compared with very familiar or very novel ones.
... Interestingly, the illusory effect was also evident even among news that were inconsistent with individuals stated political ideologies and the existence or not of prior knowledge, supporting a broad consensus that repetition influences accuracy through a lowlevel fluency heuristic (Alter & Oppenheimer, 2009;Unkelbach, 2007;Whittlesea, 1993) and is probably driven by automatic memory retrieval (Diana, Yonelinas, & Ranganath, 2007Yonelinas and Jacoby, 2012). This observation complements previously stated results from Pennycook and Rand (2017a), indicating that analytic thinking overplays the effects of motivated reasoning. ...
This study investigates the spread of fake news during the Presidential Elections of 2018 in Brazil and how distinct social media and websites are used as distribution platforms and sources of disinformation. For such, a pre-existing data set of 346 fake news stories collected during the elections served as a starting point. Initially, through a reverse search process, the main websites responsible for disseminating disinformation were mapped. These sources were then analysed in terms of traffic and partisanship.
Beyond a prevalence of right-wing fake news sources, a high concentration of web traffic was found. Five websites were responsible for almost 80% of all pageviews (or impressions) from all the 58 identified fake news sources. Furthermore, in order to investigate the circulation of disinformation on Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp, the data set was filtered into the 58 most relevant unique fake news stories, which were later classified by political bias, engagement (number of shares), and segregated in four narratives.
Firstly, it was found that all the analysed social media served as relevant distribution platforms for fake news, once 32 out of the 58 fake news stories circulated in all of them. Yet, Facebook was found to be more relevant than Twitter for that purpose.
Secondly, the four major narratives that shaped the fake news stories were mostly related to an intense polarization and declining rates of trust in public institutions and media vehicles. Among these, fake news related to anti-left/anti-workers were predominant.
Similarly to the first analysis, partisanship was noticeable during the spread of disinformation, as there were ten times more pro-Bolsonaro (or anti-Haddad) fake news stories than the polar opposite.
Finally, the findings indicate that, while Facebook and Twitter were relevant distribution
platforms, WhatsApp had a major impact on closed groups due to the reinforced cognitive effects and externalities that corroborate to the susceptibility and spread of fake news on social media.
... Cogn. Research (2021) 6:52 confident in one's memory can be associated with more biased recall of thinking that past political attitudes were more similar to current attitudes than they actually were (Grady, 2019); it could be that the feeling of familiarity of a story that leads to more reported (but not actual) memory also leads to reduced effectiveness of the otherwise strong warning because that familiarity is also associated with truthfulness (Polage, 2012;Whittlesea, 1993). Future studies may want to investigate not just whether people remember seeing the headline before but whether they remember seeing the disputed notice on it, since the memory of the information alone may have been encoded as true simply by reading it, even after the warning (Gilbert et al., 1993). ...
Politically oriented “fake news”—false stories or headlines created to support or attack a political position or person—is increasingly being shared and believed on social media. Many online platforms have taken steps to address this by adding a warning label to articles identified as false, but past research has shown mixed evidence for the effectiveness of such labels, and many prior studies have looked only at either short-term impacts or non-political information. This study tested three versions of fake news labels with 541 online participants in a two-wave study. A warning that came before a false headline was initially very effective in both discouraging belief in false headlines generally and eliminating a partisan congruency effect (the tendency to believe politically congenial information more readily than politically uncongenial information). In the follow-up survey two weeks later, however, we found both high levels of belief in the articles and the re-emergence of a partisan congruency effect in all warning conditions, even though participants had known just two weeks ago the items were false. The new pre-warning before the headline showed some small improvements over other types, but did not stop people from believing the article once seen again without a warning. This finding suggests that warnings do have an important immediate impact and may work well in the short term, though the durability of that protection is limited.
... subjects' ratings of a task as easy or effortful; more often than not, however, it is gauged via objective measures of speed and accuracy, e.g. pronunciation latency (e.g., Whittlesea 1993;Whittlesea et al. 1990), naming latency (Reber et al. 1998), or likelihood of identification (Jacoby and Dallas 1981). These objective measures of fluency generally coincide with subjective feelings of fluency. ...
Over the last few decades, empirical researchers have become increasingly interested in explaining the formation of “basic” aesthetic judgments, i.e. simple judgments of sensory preferability and the pleasure that seems to accompany them. To that end, Reber et al. have recently defended a “processing-fluency” view, which identifies aesthetic pleasure with one’s ability to easily process an object’s perceptual properties (e.g. Reber 2012). While the processing-fluency theory is certainly an improvement over its competitors, it is currently vulnerable to several serious criticisms. In what follows, I aim to provide a more holistic, explanatorily robust, model of the processing-fluency theory of aesthetic pleasure by incorporating what the view neglects: the crucial role of perceptual disfluency, interest, and the underlying values that drive aesthetic appraisal.
How can marketers create slogans that consumers like and remember? We answer this question by analyzing how the lexical, semantic, and emotional properties of a slogan’s individual words combine to influence slogan liking and slogan memory. Through a large correlational study with over 800 brand slogans, laboratory experiments, a biometric eye tracking experiment, and a field study, we unearth the word properties that make slogans effective. We predict and find that linguistic properties that make a slogan easier to process (i.e., more fluent) result in slogans that are more likable but less memorable, whereas linguistic properties that reduce processing fluency result in slogans that are less likable but more memorable. Across our multi-method investigation, participants indicated a more favorable attitude towards slogans that are shorter, omit the brand name, and use words that are linguistically frequent, perceptually distinct, and abstract. In contrast, participants were more likely to remember slogans that are longer, include the brand name, and use words that are linguistically infrequent, concrete, and less perceptually distinct. We conclude by offering marketers practical advice into optimal word-choice strategies, and delivering actionable guidance for creating slogans that are either likable or memorable.
In daily life, humans process a plethora of new information that can be either consistent (familiar) or inconsistent (novel) with prior knowledge. Over time, both types of information can integrate into our accumulated knowledge base via distinct pathways. However, the mnemonic processes supporting the integration of information that is inconsistent with prior knowledge remain under-characterized. In the current study, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the initial assimilation of novel items into the semantic network. Participants saw three repetitions of adjective-noun word pairs that were either consistent or inconsistent with prior knowledge. Twenty-four hours later, they were presented with the same stimuli again while undergoing fMRI scans. Outside the scanner, participants completed a surprise recognition test. We found that when the episodic context associated with initially inconsistent items was irretrievable, the neural signature of these items was indistinguishable from that of consistent items. In contrast, initially inconsistent items with accessible episodic contexts showed neural signatures that differed from those associated with consistent items. We suggest that, at least one day post encoding, items inconsistent with prior knowledge can show early assimilation into the semantic network only when their episodic contexts become inaccessible during retrieval, thus evoking a sense of familiarity.
A basic distinction in theories of human memory is between explicit and implicit types of memory. However, little is known, how these forms of memory interact. An interesting test case is the repetition priming effect for unfamiliar faces in familiarity decisions on the target, which is highly variable and may even reverse. Here, we tested the hypothesis that this reversed priming effect may be due to conflicts between implicit and explicit memory. After replicating the reverse priming effect, three different manipulations were effective in diminishing it. We suggest that each of these manipulations diminished the ambiguity regarding the source of priming-induced fluency of target processing. Event-related potentials were consistent with the conflict account but insensitive to the experimental manipulations. Our findings argue against a strictly independent view of explicit and implicit memory and support an interactive account of different types of memory.
Human adults distinguish their mental event simulations along various dimensions-most prominently according to their "mnemicity": we track whether these simulations are outcomes of past personal experiences or not (i.e., whether we are "remembering" or "imagining"). This distinction between memory and imagination is commonly thought to reflect a deep architectural distinction in the mind. Against this idea, I argue that mnemicity is not based on a fundamentalstructural difference between memories and imaginations but is instead the result of metacognitive attribution and social construction. On this attributional view, mnemicity is likely a uniquely human capacity that both serves collective functions and has been shaped by collective norms. First, on the individual level, mnemicity attribution is an outcome of metacognitive learning: it relies on acquired interpretations of the phenomenal features of mental event simulations. Such interpretations are in part acquired through interactive reminiscing with other community members. Further, how the distinction between memory and imagination is drawn is likely sensitive to cultural norms about what remembering is, when it is appropriate to claim to remember, what can be remembered, and what remembering entails. As a result, how individuals determine whether they remember or imagine is bound to be deeply enculturated. Second, mnemicity attribution solves an important collective challenge: who to grant epistemic authority about the past. Solving this challenge is important because-for humans-the past represents not just an opportunity to learn about the future but to coordinate present social realities. How a community determines such social realities both draws on individuals' remembering and in turn shapes when, what, and how individuals remember.
Getting from A to B has never been easier. Mobile navigation systems allow universal access to spatial information. However, following detailed route instructions leads to a decrease in spatial exploration behaviour and therefore a reduction of spatial knowledge acquisition. Facilitating spatial exploration has the potential to counteract this negative effect. This paper investigates how we can support people in re-discovering their surroundings. We designed and evaluated a mobile application to promote spatial exploration through gamification. The app requires active exploration behaviour to uncover a map. Gamification elements such as quests, statistics, and social competition are used to encourage exploration. We conducted an exploratory field study (n = 22). Our results show a significant increase in familiarity with the environment and a variety of exploration patterns. Based on our findings, we propose modifications to current mapping applications by limiting the visible cartographic elements and alternating routes to improve spatial knowledge acquisition.
Habits figure in action‐explanations because of their distinctive force. But what is the force of habit, and how does it motivate us? In this paper, I argue that the force of habit is the feeling of familiarity one has with the familiar course of action, where this feeling reveals a distinctive reason for acting in the usual way. I do this by considering and rejecting a popular account of habit's force in terms of habit's apparent automaticity, by arguing that one can do something out of habit and from deliberation, before going on to defend The Familiarity View.
Although policy transparency is praised highly to promote citizen compliance, it sometimes loses its effect in practice due to the lack of scientific design. To better exploit policy transparency, this study examined how the usability of policy transparency promotes citizen compliance, and the role of perceived benefit and descriptive social norms in this mechanism. The results of an online survey experiment conducted in the urban renewal policy domain revealed that, in the implementation of the house expropriation policy, easy-to-understand policy transparency encourages citizen compliance better, since it promotes more perceived benefits. Furthermore, descriptive social norms were found to influence the way perceived benefits promote citizen compliance; more in detail, negative norms were found to increase, and positive norms to decrease, the role of perceived benefit, eventually influencing the effectiveness of policy transparency. This research is a breakthrough for the effectiveness of policy transparency, emphasizing the role of perceived benefit and descriptive social norms in policy compliance.
People can support their abstract reasoning by using mental models with spatial simulations. Such models are employed when people represent elements in terms of ordered dimensions (e.g., who is oldest, Tom, Dick, or Harry). We test and find that the process of forming and using such mental model can influence the liking of its elements (e.g., Tom, Dick, or Harry). This is because the presumed internal structure of such models (a linear-transitive array of elements), generates variations in processing ease (fluency) when using the model as a working memory device (as documented in the well-known Symbolic Distance Effect, SDE). Specifically, processing of pairs where elements have larger distances along the order should be easier than processing of pairs with smaller distances. Given that fluency is hedonically positive, easier pairs of elements should be liked more than difficult pairs. Experiment 1 shows that unfamiliar ideographs are liked more when they have wider distances and are therefore easier to process. Experiment 2 replicates this effect with non-words. Experiment 3 rules out a non-spatial explanation of the effect while Experiments 4 offers a high-powered replication. Experiment 5 shows that the spatial effect spontaneously emerges during order learning, even without a task that explicitly focuses on fluency. Experiment 6 employed a shorter array, but yielded no significant results. Implications for cognitive fluency and mental models are discussed.
In this article, we aim to evaluate the role of robots’ personality-driven behavioural patterns on users’ intention to use in an entertainment scenario. Toward such a goal, we designed two personalities: one introverted with an empathic and self-comparative interaction style, and the other extroverted with a provocative and other-comparative interaction style. To evaluate the proposed technology acceptance model, we conducted an experiment ( N = 209) at a public venue where users were requested to play a game with the support of the TIAGo robot. Our findings show that the robot personality affects the acceptance model and three relevant drivers: perceived enjoyment, perceived usefulness, and social influence. The extroverted robot was perceived as more useful than the introverted, and participants who interacted with it were faster at solving the game. On the other hand, the introverted robot was perceived as more enjoyable but less useful than the extroverted, and participants who interacted with it made fewer mistakes. Taken together, these findings support the importance of designing proper robot personalities in influencing users’ acceptance, featuring that a given style can elicit a different driver of acceptance.
Motivated by firms' increasing use of new media technology for investor communications, we investigate how alignment between company image and communication platform affects investor judgment and decision making. In our first experiment, we demonstrate that investors expect alignment between firm image and the perception of the new media communication platform managers choose for investor relations. In a second experiment, we examine how this alignment affects investor judgment and decision making. We predict and find that greater platform-image alignment leads investors to experience subjective ease of processing, but does not change investment amounts. Additionally, we demonstrate an approach to conducting an explicit test of a null hypothesis by evaluating the convergence of null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) and Bayesian methods. Our findings have implications for researchers, firms, and investors, and add to a growing literature on new media disclosure.
The study is designed to answer the question of whether and how economic and technological factors of collectivistic vs. individualistic countries relate to metacognition, meaning self-awareness of biases (metacognitive self, MCS). The latter was measured via a questionnaire (MCSQ-40), translated (back-forth) into Polish, English, Vietnamese, Hindu, and Spanish (n = 945). Economic and technological factors were extracted from the Global Innovation Index dataset. Knowledge workers and market sophistication were chosen as the factors. The former factor when strong in a given country enhanced MCS of participants. Conversely, the latter factor, that is market sophistication, decreased MCS level of participants when significant. The results are explained in terms of Marx's theory, the beneficial role of human technology, and the theories of consciousness. JEL Classification: D10
Some research suggests people are overconfident because of personality characteristics, lack of insight, or because overconfidence is beneficial in its own right. But other research fits with the possibility that fluent experience in the moment can rapidly drive overconfidence. For example, fluency can push people to become overconfident in their ability to throw a dart, know how rainbows form or predict the future value of a commodity. But surely there are limits to overconfidence. That is, even in the face of fluency manipulations known to increase feelings of confidence, reasonable people would reject the thought that they, for example, might be able to land a plane in an emergency. To address this question, we conducted two experiments comprising a total of 780 people. We asked some people (but not others) to watch a trivially informative video of a pilot landing a plane before they rated their confidence in their own ability to land a plane. We found watching the video inflated people's confidence that they could land a plane. Our findings extend prior work by suggesting that increased semantic context creates illusions not just of prior experience or understanding—but also of the ability to actually do something implausible.
Spatial attention can be captured automatically by an exogenous stimulus (e.g., digital interruption), or by an endogenous stimulus (e.g., valence of the stimulus). In the present study, we investigated whether a non-perceptual characteristic (e.g., sense of fluency) has an impact on attention. To this end, we used the conceptual fluency paradigm developed by Whittlesea (1993) combined with the dot-probe task developed by MacLeod, Matthews and Tata (1986). In 3 experiments, we measured the response times for each experimental situation (i.e., Valid and Non-valid situations). At each trial, participants were presented is three consecutive displays on a screen: 1) an incomplete and predictive sentence stem 2) a pair of words, one of them was semantically compatible with the previous sentence stem, and 3) a circle appeared at the spatial location of one of the words. Then, participants had to perform a Go (i.e., a filled circle) No-go (i.e., an empty circle) task. The analysis found that response times were significantly faster when the Go stimulus appeared at the same location as the semantically compatible word (i.e., Valid situations). Overall, our results show that the sense of fluency triggers attentional capture. Thus, they replicate those of Gardner and al. (2020) using another experimental paradigm. Our finding might be helpful to better understand the consequences of digital interruptions on behavioral performance
The present study investigates that visual stimulation of street facades effect on judgment of recency based on a psychology method. It has been experienced an error of judgment of recency as if it was more recent than it actually was when people recalled the town scape they visited, and it is possible that the error would be one of the factor that makes people feel the townscape attractive. Previous researches have shown strong visual stimulation make judgement of recency short, because strong visual stimulation increases processing fluency of recollection. This study examined whether Japanese street façades with strong visual stimulation made judgment of recency short. The results showed that Japanese street facades with strong impression value and context effect made judgment of recency short.
Fluency is the experienced ease of ongoing mental operations, which increases the subjective positivity of stimuli attributes. This may happen because fluency is inherently positive. Alternatively, people may learn the meaning of fluency from contingencies within judgment-contexts. We test pseudocontingencies (PCs) as a mechanism through which fluency’s meaning is learned. PCs are inferred correlations between two attributes due to the observation of their jointly skewed base rates – people relate what is frequent in one attribute to what is frequent in the other. Using online seller evaluations as the dependent variable, we manipulated base rates of seller name-fluency and seller reputation, creating conditions where name-fluency aligned positively or negatively with reputation. However, participants evaluated high-fluency name sellers more positively across base-rate conditions, although we observed negative PCs between seller reputation and a fluency-neutral dimension in a follow-up study. We discuss the implications for the debate regarding fluency's positive vs. malleable nature.
In everyday language, abstract concepts are described in terms of concrete physical experiences (e.g., good things are “up”; the past is “behind” us). Stimuli congruent with such conceptual metaphors are processed faster than stimuli that are not. Since ease of processing enhances aesthetic pleasure, stimuli should be perceived as more pleasing when their presentation matches (rather than mismatches) the metaphorical mapping. In six experiments, speakers of English (Experiment 1-3a) and Farsi (Experiment 3b and 4) viewed valence- and time-related photos in arrangements congruent and incongruent with their metaphorical mapping. Consistent with the valence-verticality metaphor in both languages, English and Farsi speakers preferred visual arrangements that placed the happy photo above the sad photo. In contrast, participants’ preferences for time-related photos were moderated by the direction of writing. English speakers, who write from left to right, preferred arrangements that placed past-themed photos to the left of modern-themed photos; this was not observed for Farsi speakers, who write from right to left as
well as left to right. In sum, identical stimuli enjoy an aesthetic advantage when their spatial arrangement matches the spatial ordering implied by applicable conceptual metaphors.
Presenting calorie-equivalent exercise data (hereafter, “exercise data”) has been proven to be an effective alternative to nudge better food-consumption behavior. The present paper examines how the numerical precision of exercise-data-based food labels impacts food-consumption intention and choice. We propose that precise exercise data can trigger a salient violation of expectation on numeric format. This in turn can induce a (mis)attribution process that intensifies negative emotions linked to unhealthy food consumption, thus decreasing consumers’ consumption intentions. The results of five studies show supports to our proposition. Specifically, consumers showed lower consumption intention on unhealthy food when the food label contains precise (vs. rounded) exercise data. In addition, a real-life behavioral study indicates that the precision effect of exercise data is more prominent when the food is unhealthy versus healthy. These findings shed light for policymakers and food enterprises on the potential managerial applications of food labeling.
As expressed by the “Healthy is Up” metaphor, conceptual metaphor theory argues that the representation of health is commonly associated with high verticality because, typically, people stay upright when they are healthy whereas illness may force them to lie down. Along this line of argument, this research is the first to empirically explore the metaphorical representation of healthy food in terms of verticality. Across five experiments (N = 714), this article first demonstrates that people are faster to pair healthy food with up than down in an implicit association test (Study 1, supporting a metaphorical congruency effect). Then, it shows that people associate healthy food with high verticality and unhealthy food with low verticality by placing healthy food up high and unhealthy food low down along the vertical axis, and by preferring a food pyramid that depicts healthy food at the top rather than at the bottom (Studies 2a, 2b and 3, supporting an abstract-to-concrete effect). Last, this research finds that people judge a food product as healthier when it is pictured from an upward-looking angle than when it is pictured from a downward-looking angle (Study 4, supporting a concrete-to-abstract effect). Further analyses test the interaction between individual differences in self-control and the effects of the “Healthy is Up” metaphor in Studies 2a, 2b, 3 and 4. The article concludes with a discussion of the theoretical and practical implications of this research.
It is well established that beliefs provide powerful cues that influence reasoning. Over the last decade research has revealed that judgments based upon logical structure may also pre-empt deliberative reasoning. Evidence for ‘intuitive logic’ has been claimed using a range of measures (i.e. confidence ratings or latency of response on conflict problems). However, it is unclear how well such measures genuinely reflect logical intuition. In this paper we introduce a new method designed to test for evidence of intuitive logic. In two experiments participants were asked to make random judgments about the logical validity of a series of simple and complex syllogistic arguments. For simple arguments there was an effect of logical validity on random responding, which was absent for complex arguments. These findings provide a novel demonstration that people are intuitively sensitive to logical structure.
Repeated statements are rated as subjectively truer than comparable new statements, even though repetition alone provides no new, probative information (the illusory truth effect). Contrary to some theoretical predictions, the illusory truth effect seems to be similar in magnitude for repetitions occurring after minutes or weeks. This Registered Report describes a longitudinal investigation of the illusory truth effect (n = 608, n = 567 analysed) in which we systematically manipulated intersession interval (immediately, one day, one week, and one month) in order to test whether the illusory truth effect is immune to time. Both our hypotheses were supported: We observed an illusory truth effect at all four intervals (overall effect: χ 2(1) = 169.91; M repeated = 4.52, M new = 4.14; H1), with the effect diminishing as delay increased (H2). False information repeated over short timescales might have a greater effect on truth judgements than repetitions over longer timescales. Researchers should consider the implications of the choice of intersession interval when designing future illusory truth effect research.
This research studied difficult-to-pronounce product names which are prevalent in certain product categories. In study 1, consumers tried golf balls that varied in name pronounceability but were otherwise identical and, despite direct experience, concluded balls with difficult versus easy-to-pronounce names were less controllable and less preferable. In study 2, consumers were asked to look for a dog that was highly (less highly) controllable for an urban (rural) setting, and the dog with the difficult-to-pronounce name was viewed as less controllable because it seemed less familiar and was less preferred for the urban setting. Study 3 verified the effects of difficult-to-pronounce names on familiarity and controllability perceptions and found preference effects among those with high trait desire for control. Study 4 documented the prevalence of difficult-to-pronounce names on a popular ecommerce site for tires. Overall, our findings indicate managers should avoid using difficult-to-pronounce product names when consumers strongly desire product controllability.
Marketing on social media has become ubiquitous. Consequently, social media platforms are increasing the level of advertising content that users may later encounter when navigating online shopping websites. It is unclear how this amplification of exposure to marketing messages through social media affects consumers’ attitudes to products online. Furthermore, the roles of social media participation and proneness to experience Fear of Missing Out on product attitude remain largely unexplored. In this research ( N = 1002), we employed an online survey of US Instagram users. These data were submitted to three-way moderation regression analyses with attitude toward the product as the dependent variable. Consumers who are more active on social media and had high (vs low) Fear of Missing Out expressed more favorable attitudes toward online products after being exposed to Instagram content (vs not exposed). The theoretical and practical implications for cognitive processing research and advertising strategy and study limitations are discussed.
the purpose of the present chapter is to consider functional dissociations between these two classes of tasks and to sketch a theory rationalizing their interrelation
the first section of the chapter reviews an approach to explaining dissociations developed within the domain of laboratory memory tasks
the second section briefly reviews dissociations between explicit and implicit measures of retention, as a function of both subject variables and independent variables under experimental control
the third section considers the standard explanations of functional dissociations between measures of retention in terms of differing memory systems, particularly the episodic/semantic distinction and the declarative/procedural distinction
the fourth section is devoted to spelling out an alternative theory that, in many ways, embodies the notion of encoding specificity to explain the dissociations between explicit and implicit retention
the fifth section of the chapter is aimed at specifying these ideas better and providing further evidence about their validity
the sixth and final section addresses problems of the transfer-appropriate processing approach and suggests future research (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The familiarity of names produced by their prior presentation can be misinterpreted as fame. We used this false fame effect to separately study the effects of divided attention on familiarity versus conscious recollection. In a first experiment, famous and nonfamous names were presented to be read under conditions of full vs. divided attention. Divided attention greatly reduced later recognition memory performance but had no effect on gains in familiarity as measured by fame judgments. In later experiments, we placed recognition memory and familiarity in opposition by presenting only nonfamous names to be read in the first phase. Recognizing a name as earlier read on the later fame test allowed Ss to be certain that it was nonfamous. Divided attention at study or during the fame test reduced list recognition performance but had no effect on familiarity. We conclude that conscious recollection is an attention-demanding act that is separate from assessing familiarity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Prior to each target letter string presented visually to 120 university students in a speeded word–nonword classification task, either {bird, body, building,} or {xxx} appeared as a priming event. Five types of word-prime/word-target trials were used: bird-robin, bird-arm, body-door, body-sparrow, and body-heart. The stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between prime and target letter string varied between 250 and 2,000 msec. At 2,000-msec SOA, reaction times (RTs) on bird-robin type trials were faster than on xxx-prime trials (facilitation), whereas RTs on bird-arm type trials were slower than on xxx-prime (inhibition). As SOA decreased, the facilitation effect on bird-robin trials remained constant, but the inhibition effect on bird-arm decreased until, at 250-msec SOA, there was no inhibition. For Shift conditions at 2,000-msec SOA, facilitation was obtained on body-door type trials and inhibition was obtained on body-sparrow type. These effects decreased as SOA decreased until there was no facilitation or inhibition. On body-heart type trials, there was an inhibition effect at 2,000 msec SOA, which decreased as SOA decreased until, at 250-msec SOA, it became a facilitation effect. Results support the theory of M. I. Posner and S. R. Snyder (1975) that postulated 2 distinct components of attention: a fast automatic inhibitionless spreading-activation process and a slow limited-capacity conscious-attention mechanism. (27 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Subjects rated how certain they were that each of 60 statements was true or false. The statements were sampled from areas of knowledge including politics, sports, and the arts, and were plausible but unlikely to be specifically known by most college students. Subjects gave ratings on three successive occasions at 2-week intervals. Embedded in the list were a critical set of statements that were either repeated across the sessions or were not repeated. For both true and false statements, there was a significant increase in the validity judgments for the repeated statements and no change in the validity judgments for the non-repeated statements. Frequency of occurrence is apparently a criterion used to establish the referential validity of plausible statements.
Several studies have reported priming effects that span an intervening unrelated word (Davelaar & Coltheart, 1975; Meyer, Schvaneveldt, & Ruddy, 1972). More recently, other investigators have suggested that such relatedness effects are the result of postaccess processes (Gough, Alford, & Holley-Wilcox, 1981; Masson, 1991; Ratcliff & McKoon, 1988). In fact, these investigators claim that when procedures are used that discourage the use of postaccess processes, relatedness effects do not span intervening unrelated words. The present experiments demonstrate reliable relatedness effects with procedures that eliminate postaccess processes. These results are consistent with the notion of spreading activation among local representations in memory. Implications for the issue of local versus distributed representations are discussed.
Cognitive psychologists have begun to talk about consciousness, but they have frequently shied away from explicitly including conscious phenomena in their theories. The ambivalence toward consciousness probably arises in part out of the proscription of consciousness during the behaviorist interlude; in part it is a function of the drive for computational models. At the present time consciousness is not proscribed, but it is also not (yet) computable. I assert, though, that an understanding of the functions of consciousness is important for a complete cognitive psychology. My explorations of consciousness are offered, in part, to convince the cognitive community that it should try to come to grips with the problem.
Comparisons of the relative sensitivity of direct and indirect tasks can provide definitive evidence for unconscious memory when the direct and indirect tasks are matched on all characteristics except instructions. To demonstrate unconscious memory in normal adults, subjects first viewed pairs of words and named one cued word in each pair. During the subsequent assessment of memory, new words and either previously cued words (Experiment 1) or previously uncued words (Experiments 2A and 2B) were presented against a background mask. The subjects judged whether a word was old or new (direct task) or whether the contrast between a word and the mask was high or low (indirect task). For cued words, the direct task was more sensitive than the indirect task. However, for uncued words, the indirect task was initially more sensitive than the direct task, even though the direct task exhibited hypermnesia so that it became more sensitive than the indirect task across trial blocks. The greater initial sensitivity of the indirect task implicates unconscious processes underlying memory for the uncued words. These results indicate that unconscious processes in normal adults can be revealed through comparisons of comparable direct and indirect measures.
12 undergraduates were required to classify letter strings as words or nonwords under the following 3 conditions: (a) when the target stimulus alone was presented, (b) when the target was preceded by an incomplete sentence, and (c) when the target was preceded by a string of 4 spelled-out digits. Word targets were either high- or low-frequency items and either semantically congruous or incongruous with respect to the incomplete sentence. Nonword targets were either pronounceable or nonpronounceable. The presentation of sentence contexts facilitated the classification of congruous words and both pronounceable and nonpronounceable nonwords but interfered with classification of incongruous words. The digit contexts interfered with the classification of incongruous words. The digit contexts interfered equally with the processing of all targets. Results are discussed within the framework of J. Morton's (see PA, vol 43:11276) logogen model of word processing. (24 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
We interpret the difference between aware and unaware forms of memory in terms of Polanyi's distinction between tool and object. Aware memory, such as recognition and recall, occurs when memory serves as an object of attention. Unaware memory occurs when memory serves as a tool to accomplish a present task. Both memory-as-tool and memory-as-object can rely on memory for specific prior experiences. Memory used as a tool is a pervasive form of unconscious influence. We present experiments in which memory used as a tool enhances perception, lowers the subjective experience of background noise, increases the fame of nonfamous names, and lowers estimates of the difficulty of anagrams. To escape the pervasive effects of unconscious memory, one must consciously remember the past experience, understand its influence in the present task, and possess a good theory to serve as an alternative basis for behavior. These three criteria may seldom be met.
Experiments were designed to produce illusions of immediate memory and of perception, in order to demonstrate that subjective experience of familiarity and perceptual quality may rely on an unconscious attribution process. Subjects saw a short and rapidly presented list of words, then pronounced and judged a target word. We influenced the fluency of pronouncing the target through independent manipulation of repetition and visual clarity. Judgments of repetition were influenced by clarity (Experiments 1 and 2), but not when subjects knew that clarity was manipulated (Experiment 3). Conversely, judgments of clarity were influenced by repetition (Experiment 4). We interpret these symmetric illusions to mean that fluent performance is unconsciously attributed to whatever source is apparent and that feelings of familiarity and perceptual quality result when fluency is attributed respectively to past experience or current circumstances.
In 3 experiments, plausible but unfamiliar facts were presented with comments that bias Ss to believe or doubt the truth of the facts. A total of 325 university students participated. It was proposed that the ring of truth is based on the accord between the facts expressed by a statement and the facts retrieved from memory. Negative biases reduced the probability that presented facts were learned, relative to affirmative comments. Statements that repeated affirmatively biased facts rang truer than statements that repeated negatively biased facts, which themselves rang truer than new statements. Statements that contradicted affirmatively biased facts rang more false than statements that contradicted negatively biased facts. Ss made more precise recognition decisions about old affirmative than old negative statements. Results could not be explained by a discounting-cue hypothesis. (French abstract) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The influence of memory on the subjective experience of later events was investigated in two experiments. In one experiment, previously heard sentences and new sentences were presented against a background of white noise that varied in intensity. In a second experiment, a cue set of words was presented either before or after a target set that was embedded in noise. The cue set was either the same as or different from the target set. In both experiments, one of the tasks was to judge the loudness of the noise. The data show that subjects were unable to discount the contribution of memory to perception when judging the noise level. Subjects appeared to base their noise judgments on ease of interpretation of the message presented through noise, with differences in ease being misattributed to a difference in noise level. The advantages of subjective experience as a measure of memory, and the role of subjective experience and misattribution in confusions between cognitive and physical deficits are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
People can become sensitive to the rules of a grammar without awareness. A. S. Reber (1989) and others have argued that this implicit learning results from automatic abstraction of general structure. Instead, it is argued that people perform only those operations required to satisfy known demands. In various tasks, Ss learned the structures of individual items, coded experiences of processing items in specific ways, or abstracted elements of the general structure: There was no evidence that Ss abstracted structure when it was not required to perform the immediate task. Each type of knowledge was acquired without awareness that the domain had a general structure, but each made Ss sensitive to certain aspects of that structure, enabling them to identify grammatical items in an unanticipated test. The conclusion is that implicit sensitivity to general structure is accidental, a by-product of coding whatever Ss experience in processing stimuli for another purpose. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Amnesics reveal savings in their objective performance of a task even though they are not aware of remembering. The authors review experiments that reveal a dissociation of memory and awareness for normals as well as amnesics. The episodic–semantic memory distinction has been employed by others as an account of the dissociation of memory and awareness. An account of this sort leads one to expect that remembering without awareness would be relatively context-free. In contrast, several experiments show that remembering without awareness can be specific to memory for a particular episode. (French abstract) (52 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The results of two experiments showed that an illusion of memory can be produced by unconscious perception. In a first phase of those experiments, a long list of words was presented for study. For the test of recognition memory given in the second phase of each experiment, presentation of a "context" word preceded that of most recognition test words. Ss were to judge whether or not the test words had been presented during the earlier study phase of the experiment. Effects of a context word on this recognition memory decision were opposite when Ss were aware vs. unaware of its presentation. For example, as compared to a condition in which no context word was presented, the probability of false recognition was increased when Ss were unaware but decreased when Ss were aware of the presentation of a context word that matched the recognition test word. Results are discussed in terms of unconscious influences on an attribution process. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
People often have general knowledge about a category as well as knowing some of its members. These forms of knowledge and how they are coordinated in dealing with new stimuli were investigated. Ss were trained twice on the same items, coding them as whole units on some trials and analyzing their typical features on others. In generalization tests, Ss used these forms of knowledge selectively, depending on the type of judgment required but also depending on the perceptual organization of the display, the sequence of activities performed in test, and the demands of concomitant tasks. These test factors caused the Ss to organize a new stimulus as a unit or as a collection of features; in turn, this organization of the stimulus cued whichever representations of prior experience were similar. It was concluded that selective utilization of general and specific knowledge is controlled by multiple task factors that determine the initial processing of a stimulus. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The repeated exposure of unmasked irregular geometric shapes for very brief durations (1 or 2 ms) has been shown to generate preferences as well as judgments of familiarity for the previously exposed shapes. At the same time these stimuli are not recognized as having been presented. Such exposure also leads to judgments of brightness and darkness independent of stimulus intensity, and it is dependent on the use of unmasked stimuli. This effect is nonspecific, in contrast to stimulus-specific effects with masked stimuli, and it is not restricted to affective judgments. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Noting that items seen for the 2nd time in an experiment (old items) can be perceived more readily (fluently) than items seen for the 1st time (new items), it was hypothesized that perceptual fluency is used as a cue for discriminating old from new items. 40 undergraduates served as Ss. In the test phase of a recognition task, each item was gradually clarified until it was identified, at which time Ss made an old–new judgment. It was expected that fluently perceived (quickly identified) items would tend to be judged old regardless of their actual old–new status. In Exp I, results show that words were more likely to be judged old both if they were quickly identified and, independently of this, if they actually were old. The latter finding implicates a factor (directed memory search) other than perceptual fluency in recognition judgments. Exp II succeeded in reducing the contribution of this additional factor by using nonwords rather than words. Results indicate that Ss' recognition judgments for nonwords were more dependent on speed of identification than they were on actual old–new status. It is proposed that perceptual fluency is the basis of the feeling of familiarity and is 1 of 2 important factors that make variable contributions to recognition judgments. (13 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Nonfamous names presented once in an experiment are mistakenly judged as famous 24 hr later. On an immediate test, no such false fame occurs. This phenomenon parallels the sleeper effect found in studies of persuasion. People may escape the unconscious effects of misleading information by recollecting its source, raising the criterion level of familiarity required for judgments of fame, or by changing from familiarity to a more analytic basis for judgment. These strategies place constraints on the likelihood of sleeper effects. We discuss these results as the unconscious use of the past as a tool vs its conscious use as an object of reflection. Conscious recollection of the source of information does not always occur spontaneously when information is used as a tool in judgment. Rather, conscious recollection is a separate act. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Recent models of sentence context effects predict that the pattern of facilitation and inhibition of response to sentence
completions should be influenced by the experiment-wide contextual “environment.” In the present experiments, this environment
was manipulated in several ways, including the degree to which contexts constrained possible completions, the probability
of predictable completions’ being presented, and the probability of congruous completions’ being presented. In Experiment
1, decreasing the proportion of congruent test words had no effect on either the facilitation for highly likely words or the
inhibition for incongruent words; increasing the proportion of predictable words produced no increase in facilitation for
these words, but did increase the inhibition for incongruous words. In Experiment 2, contexts with very high or very low degrees
of constraint produced equivalent results when predictability was uniformly low: no facilitation for unlikely but congruent
words, and inhibition for incongruent words. In general, the patterns of change in facilitation and inhibition caused by changes
in the contextual environment were more consistent with the modified two-process model (Stanovich & West, 1983) than with
the verification model (Becker, 1982). But the limited range of influence suggests that, under conditions approximating normal
reading, little use is made of such “metacontextual” information.
An incomplete sentence context facilitated a subsequent lexical decision only when the test word was a highly likely completion of the sentence. Context had no effect on congruent but unlikely words, while it inhibited responses to anomalous words. The inhibition was eliminated in a control condition in which none of the test words meaningfully completed the context. In contrast, subjects could not eliminate the inhibition or the facilitation when they were instructed to ignore the implication of each context. It was concluded that contextual information in reading is typically used to focus attention on a class of responses which conserve the meaningfulness of the sentence, but that the deployment of attention will vary with the predictability of the material.
Past experience can facilitate subsequent perceptual activities as well as serve as the basis for recognition memory. However, the memory underlying perception is commonly assumed to be more “general” and, consequently, to preserve less information about the initial event than does the memory that underlies recognition for a specific episode. In contrast, experiments are performed which demonstrate that perceptual identification and recognition memory both rely on memory for single prior processing episodes. In these experiments, the subjects' reliance on data-driven rather than conceptually driven processing of a word was changed by varying the context in which the word was read. A greater degree of data-driven processing of a word, such as having a subject read the word out of context, facilitated later perceptual identification of that word. Conversely, a greater degree of conceptually driven processing of a word, such as having the subject generate the word from a conceptual clue, resulted in better recognition memory and less facilitation of perceptual identification. This sensitivity of perceptual identification to the balance between data-driven and conceptually driven processing in a single prior processing episode provides a means of analyzing interactive processes in reading.
Affect is considered by most contemporary theories to be postcognitive,
that is, to occur only after considerable cognitive operations have
been accomplished. Yet a number of experimental results on preferences,
attitudes, impression formation, and decision making, as well as
some clinical phenomena, suggest that affective judgments may be
fairly independent of, and precede in time, the sorts of perceptual
and cognitive operations commonly assumed to be the basis of these
affective judgments. Affective reactions to stimuli are often the
very first reactions of the organism, and for lower organisms they
are the dominant reactions. Affective reactions can occur without
extensive perceptual and cognitive encoding, are made with greater
confidence than cognitive judgments, and can be made sooner. Experimental
evidence is presented demonstrating that reliable affective discriminations
(likedislike ratings) can be made in the total absence of recognition
memory (oldnew judgments). Various differences between judgments
based on affect and those based on perceptual and cognitive processes
are examined. It is concluded that affect and cognition are under
the control of separate and partially independent systems that can
influence each other in a variety of ways, and that both constitute
independent sources of effects in information processing. (139 ref)
(PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved)
Subjects read aloud words presented once at the rate of one per second. A perceptual identification task, involving 30- or
50-msec presentations, followed. Some of the words presented for identification had been read previously; others were new.
After each presentation, in addition to identifying the word, the subjects judged its duration. The data indicate that a single
presentation of a word affects its later perception, as revealed by enhanced perceptual identification, longer duration judgments,
and better temporal discrimination. A second experiment showed that a single presentation influenced duration judgments even
when identification was not required. The final experiment addressed the issue of what is preserved in memory from a prior
presentation. The results from the three experiments indicate that duration judgments provide a valuable dependent measure
of memory in the perceptual identification task and support the misattribution hypothesis: A prior presentation enhances perceptual
identification, and this increase in relative perceptual fluency is incorrectly attributed to a longer presentation duration.
Reports experiments designed to explore the relationship between the more aware autobiographical form of memory that is measured by a recognition memory test and the less aware form of memory that is expressed in perceptual learning. Ss were 247 undergraduates. Variables such as the level of processing of words during study influenced recognition memory, but not subsequent perceptual recognition. In contrast, variables such as the number and the spacing of repetitions produced parallel effects on perceptual recognition and recognition memory. It is suggested that there are 2 bases for recognition memory. If an item is readily perceived so that it seems to "jump out" from the page, the S is likely to judge that it has been seen in the experimental situation. The 2nd basis for recognition memory involves elaboration of a word's study context and depends on such factors as level of processing during study--factors not important for perceptual recognition of isolated words. Effects of study on perceptual recognition appear to be totally due to memory for physical or graphemic information. Results are also relevant to theories of perceptual learning. Effects of study on perceptual recognition partly depend on the same variables as do effects on more standard memory tests. (59 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved).
Reading fluency as a basis for judgments of text comprehension: Misattributions of the effects of past experience
- M Carroll
- M E J Masson
Carroll, M., & Masson, M. E. J. (1992). Reading fluency as a basis
for judgments of text comprehension: Misattributions of the effects of past experience. Unpublished manuscript.
Direct vs. indirect memory measures for source: Modality judgments
- C M Kelley
- L L Jacoby
- A Hollingshead
Kelley, C. M., Jacoby, L. L., & Hollingshead, A. (1989). Direct vs.
indirect memory measures for source: Modality judgments. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 15, 1101-1108.
The teachers' handbook of 30,000 words
- E L Thorndike
- I Lorge
Thorndike, E. L., & Lorge, I. (1944). The teachers' handbook of
30,000 words. New York: Columbia University Press.