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Related Experiment Videos

The mere exposure effect is differentially sensitive to different judgment tasks

J G Seamon1, P A McKenna, N Binder

  • 1Department of Psychology, Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, 06459-0408, USA. jseamon@wesleyan.edu

Consciousness and Cognition
|May 30, 1998
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

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The mere exposure effect, a boost in liking from repeated exposure, was only found for affective judgments, not for brighter, darker, or liking judgments of shapes. This suggests affective responses are key to the mere exposure effect.

Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Social Psychology
  • Neuroscience

Background:

  • The mere exposure effect describes how familiarity with stimuli increases positive affect.
  • Previous research primarily focused on affective judgments, leaving the generalizability of this effect to other judgment types unexplored.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate whether non-affective judgments (e.g., brightness) can elicit a mere exposure effect for novel stimuli.
  • To determine if affective primacy or perceptual fluency hypotheses better explain the mere exposure effect compared to nonspecific activation.

Main Methods:

  • Two experiments were conducted using two-dimensional random shapes as stimuli.
  • Participants made judgments about shapes, including liking, brightness, and darkness, after varying exposure levels.

Related Experiment Videos

  • Shape recognition accuracy was assessed to control for explicit memory.

    • Main Results:

    • Affective judgments (liking) reliably produced a mere exposure effect, increasing target selection.
    • Non-affective judgments (brighter, darker) did not differentiate target from distracter shapes, failing to produce a mere exposure effect.
    • These findings held true regardless of whether participants could accurately recognize the shapes (shape recognition above or at chance).

    Conclusions:

    • The mere exposure effect is primarily driven by affective responses, not general cognitive processing or nonspecific activation.
    • Results support affective primacy and perceptual fluency hypotheses over the nonspecific activation hypothesis in explaining the mere exposure effect.
    • Future research should explore the neural mechanisms underlying affect-driven familiarity effects.