Abstract
According to attribution models of familiarity assessment, people can use a heuristic in recognition-memory decisions, in which they attribute the subjective ease of processing of a memory probe to a prior encounter with the stimulus in question. Research in social cognition suggests that experienced positive affect may be the proximal cue that signals fluency in various experimental contexts. In the present study, we compared the effects of positive affect and fluency on recognition-memory judgments for faces with neutral emotional expression. We predicted that if positive affect is indeed the critical cue that signals processing fluency at retrieval, then its manipulation should produce effects that closely mirror those produced by manipulations of processing fluency. In two experiments, we employed a masked-priming procedure in combination with a Remember-Know (RK) paradigm that aimed to separate familiarity- from recollection-based memory decisions. In addition, participants performed a prime-discrimination task that allowed us to take inter-individual differences in prime awareness into account. We found highly similar effects of our priming manipulations of processing fluency and of positive affect. In both cases, the critical effect was specific to familiarity-based recognition responses. Moreover, in both experiments it was reflected in a shift toward a more liberal response bias, rather than in changed discrimination. Finally, in both experiments, the effect was found to be related to prime awareness; it was present only in participants who reported a lack of such awareness on the prime-discrimination task. These findings add to a growing body of evidence that points not only to a role of fluency, but also of positive affect in familiarity assessment. As such they are consistent with the idea that fluency itself may be hedonically marked.
Highlights
Most people can relate to experiencing an immediate and compelling sense of familiarity toward an individual, despite being unable to recall a specific past encounter with that person
In Experiment 1, we show that the classic effect of processing fluency on recognition memory extends to face stimuli; we report that the masked presentation of a face with the same identity as a subsequent memory probe leads to a liberal shift in response bias in familiarity-based memory decisions; in line with Jacoby and Whitehouse’s original findings, this effect is dependent on lack of awareness of the priming manipulation
We examined whether there was an effect on the general bias to endorse faces as “old” when memory decisions were familiarity-based
Summary
Most people can relate to experiencing an immediate and compelling sense of familiarity toward an individual, despite being unable to recall a specific past encounter with that person This familiarity experience was illustrated by Mandler in his classic butcher-on-the-bus scenario: One may encounter the town butcher in an unusual context, i.e., on the bus, and be left with an impression of familiarity in the absence of successful recovery of any episodic context of a prior meeting (Mandler, 1980). This sense of familiarity can be contrasted with a recollective recognition experience, in which contextual details of a specific past encounter can be recovered. Dating back to research in the early 1980s, there have been suggestions in the literature that impressions of familiarity may not necessarily be the result of direct access to a pertinent stored representation, but can be based on other, more indirect sources
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