Some observations upon perceptual organization and the mere exposure effect.
The mere repetition of events tends to enhance subjective familiarity and subjective preference for those events. It has been shown that the enhancement of subjective preference is neither contingent upon a feeling of familiarity nor an awareness of the physical identity of the stimulus during learning. This finding is surprising since the weight of existing theoretical and empirical evidence suggests that subjective preference is derivative of familiarity. An experiment was conducted to test the hypothesis that at least one preattentive/preconscious product, figure-ground organization, is shared between the processes responsible for preference enhancement and those responsible for the enhancement of recognition memory. There were two significant findings. First, subjects were able to discriminate between objectively familiar stimuli and objectively unfamiliar stimuli on the basis of preference judgments but were unable to do so on the basis of familiarity judgments. Second, preference enhancement occurred only for those objectively familiar stimuli for which the figure-ground aspects had not been phenomenally reversed. The significance of these findings is discussed.
Columbia University--Harlem Hospital Community Support Systems Program, New York, N.Y.
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Todman
D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D003463:Cues; D003867:Depth Perception; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D005556:Form Perception; D006801:Humans; D008875:Middle Aged; D009949:Orientation; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D012718:Set, Psychology