Perceptual fluency and affect without recognition

Loop and Enjoy: A Scoping Review of the Research on the Effects of Processing Fluency on Aesthetic Reactions to Auditory Stimuli

Processing fluency has been shown to affect how people aesthetically evaluate stimuli. While this effect is well documented for visual stimuli, the evidence accumulated for auditory stimuli has not yet been integrated. Our aim was to examine the relevant research on how processing fluency affects the aesthetic appreciation of auditory stimuli and to identify the extant knowledge gaps in this body of evidence. This scoping review of 19 studies reported across 13 articles found that, similarly to visual stimuli, fluency has a positive effect on liking of auditory stimuli. Additionally, we identified certain elements that impede the generalizability of the current research on the relationship between fluency and aesthetic reactions to auditory stimuli, such as a lack of consistency in the number of repeated exposures, the tendency to omit the affective component and the failure to account for personal variables such as musical abilities developed through musical training or the participants' personality or preferences. These results offer a starting point in developing novel and proper processing fluency manipulations of auditory stimuli and suggest several avenues for future research aiming to clarify the impact and importance of processing fluency and disfluency in this domain.

The Mere Exposure Effect: An Uncertainty Reduction Explanation Revisited

A misattribution explanation for the mere exposure effect posits that individuals misattribute perceptual fluency to liking when they are not aware that the fluency comes from prior exposure. The uncertainty reduction explanation posits that individuals prefer stimuli that are familiar and is consistent with findings that stimuli judged old were preferred to those judged new. The present research provides evidence to support an uncertainty reduction account of the mere exposure effect. The results of Experiment 1 show that three different operationalizations of uncertainty reduction—prior exposure, subjective familiarity, and confidence—all led to enhanced affect. The results in Experiment 2 show that participants corrected their cognitive responses but not their affective responses at higher levels of exposure frequency, suggesting that misattribution may be accountable for exposure effects in cognitive judgments but not in affective judgments.