On the costs of accessible attitudes: detecting that the attitude object has changed

The present research examined whether individuals with more accessible attitudes have more difficulty detecting that the attitude object has changed. While being repeatedly exposed to photographs of undergraduates, participants either rehearsed their attitudes toward each photo or performed a control task. They then saw these original photos and computer-generated morphs representing varying degrees of change in an original. Participants in the attitude rehearsal condition required more time to correctly identify morphs that were similar to the original as "different" (Experiment 1) and made more errors in response to such morphs (Experiment 2). Experiment 3 revealed that participants with accessible attitudes perceived relatively less change; they were less likely to view a morph as a photo of a novel person and more likely to view it as a different photo of a person seen before. The costs and benefits of accessible attitudes are discussed.