Motion fluency effects on object preference is limited to learned context.

Jonathan Charles Flavell,Bryony Mckean

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0244110

Abstract

Recently, Flavell et al. (2019) demonstrated that an object's motion fluency (how smoothly and predictably it moves) influences liking of the object itself. Though the authors demonstrated learning of object-motion associations, participants only preferred fluently associated objects over disfluently associated objects when ratings followed a moving presentation but not a stationary presentation. In the presented experiment, we tested the possibility that this apparent failure of associative learning / evaluative conditioning was due to stimulus choice. To do so we replicate part of the original work but change the 'naturally stationary' household object stimuli with winged insects which move in a similar way to the original motions. Though these more ecologically valid stimuli should have facilitated object to motion associations, we again found that preference effects were only apparent following moving presentations. These results confirm the potential of motion fluency for 'in the moment' preference change, and they demonstrate a critical boundary condition that should be considered when attempting to generalise fluency effects across contexts such as in advertising or behavioural interventions.

Highlights

This subjective ease or difficulty of processing perceptual information is known as perceptual fluency [1] and there is considerable evidence demonstrating that the easier the perceptual processing of a target, the more positive the assessment of that target is
To be truly useful the preference effect must persist to a situation in which the stimulus is presented without an ongoing manipulation i.e. object-fluency associations must be learned and later recalled when the object is seen free of its earlier fluency manipulation
Ratings were performed before and after the exposure phase to assess the impact of those object-fluency associations

Summary

Introduction

This subjective ease or difficulty of processing perceptual information is known as perceptual fluency [1] and there is considerable evidence demonstrating that the easier the perceptual processing of a target, the more positive the assessment of that target is. Though object-fluency associations were learned and led to preference effects on moving objects, these associations were not evoked when objects were presented in a stationary (i.e. non-manipulated) context This finding was surprising given that associative learning / evaluative conditioning (see [8] for review) predicts that learning and retrieval would have occurred following the repeated pairing of the conditioned stimulus (CS; the object)) with the positive (fluent) or negative (disfluent) unconditioned stimulus (±US; motion). In this way we can explore whether fluency effects strengthen following repeated exposure and whether fluency effects survive a change from a moving to a stationary context when stimuli appropriate to the motion are used This experiment serves as the first attempt to replicate the original motion fluency study of Flavell et al 2019 [7]. Whether preference effects are present in the stationary presentation condition determines whether the current paradigm is appropriate for an applied setting or whether further development is necessary

Materials and methods

Procedure and task

Participants

Results

Discussion