Effect Of Perceptual Fluency Research Articles

Accessibility and Age: Can Legibility Improve Opportunity to Process Advertising?

Inclusive design considers usability first: to design with the needs of everyone to decrease the mismatch between the end-user and the design object. In advertising, the mismatch may be in the opportunity to process an advertisement due to design strategies (i.e., executional ad cues). Based on the Motivation-Opportunity-Ability model of information processing, we focus on legibility as an important but underexplored encoding issue that can enhance consumers’ opportunity to process ads based on visual clarity and lead to perceptual fluency effects. Visual acuity declines with age, so legibility is particularly important for older adults and those with vision loss. In line with recommended accessibility guidelines, we manipulated two advertising design factors believed to impact legibility—color contrast and font style—in the supers of a video advertisement for a pharmaceutical drug and tested the communication outcomes (cognition, persuasion). Across three studies with three different-aged populations, we show that legibility was positively related to awareness of information in the supers and to positive perceptions of the advertisement. In line with accessibility guidelines, legibility was rated the highest for most people in the high-color contrast sans serif font supers. Implications for theory, accessibility and older people, and public policy are discussed.

Three minutes to change preferences: perceptual fluency and response inhibition.

Perceptual fluency and response inhibition are well-established techniques to unobtrusively manipulate preference: objects are devalued following association with disfluency or inhibition. These approaches to preference change are extensively studied individually, but there is less research examining the impact of combining the two techniques in a single intervention. In short (3 min) game-like tasks, we examine the preference and memory effects of perceptual fluency and inhibition individually, and then the cumulative effects of combining the two techniques. The first experiment confirmed that perceptual fluency and inhibition techniques influence immediate preference judgements but, somewhat surprisingly, combining these techniques did not lead to greater effects than either technique alone. The second experiment replicated the first but with changes to much more closely imitate a real-world application: measuring preference after 20 min of unrelated intervening tasks, modifying the retrieval context via room change, and generalization from computer images of objects to real-world versions of those objects. Here, the individual effects of perceptual fluency and inhibition were no longer detected, whereas combining these techniques resulted in preference change. These results demonstrate the potential of short video games as a means of influencing behaviour, such as food choices to improve health and well-being.

The effect of perceptual fluency on overcoming the interference of the More A–More B intuitive rule among primary school students.

The More A–More B intuitive rule has become a research hotspot in the field of mathematical education in recent years. The intuitive rule of More A–More B is often reflected in students’ responses to comparison tasks. In such tasks, students are asked to compare 2 objects that differ in a certain salient quantity A (where Al > A2) with respect to another quantity B (where B1 = B2 or B1 B2. In a series of 4 experiments, the present study examined the general applicability of the More A–More B intuitive rule and the impact of perceptual fluency on overcoming the interference of this rule among Chinese primary school students in a perimeter comparison task. Experiment 1 examined the characteristics and developmental patterns of the interference of the More A–More B intuitive rule among primary school students (Grades 3–6; N = 123) in a perimeter comparison task. The results demonstrated that Grade 3–6 students were interfered by the More A–More B intuitive rule while solving the task, especially among Grade 3 students. Experiments 2, 3, and 4 explored the influence of perceptual fluency on overcoming the interference of the More A–More B intuitive rule among Grade 3 students by using different experimental paradigms and different manipulation methods. A pilot experiment (Experiment 2; N = 40) was first conducted to test the validity of the manipulation of perceptual fluency. Experiment 3 (N = 70) used a between-subjects design to examine the impact of perceptual fluency on overcoming the interference of the More A–More B intuitive rule by manipulating the clarity of shapes. Controlling for individual differences, Experiment 4 (N = 27) used a within-subject design to further examine the impact of perceptual fluency on overcoming the interference of the More A–More B intuitive rule by presenting shapes either in a high figure-ground contrast or in a low figure-ground contrast. The results of Experiments 3 and 4 consistently showed that participants were significantly less interfered by the More A–More B intuitive rule under the lower perceptual fluency condition. In conclusion, these studies provide evidence for the effectiveness of a perceptual fluency manipulation to overcome the interference of the More A–More B intuitive rule. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)

Competing for affection: Perceptual fluency and ambiguity solution.

Human perceptual processes are highly efficient and rapidly extract information to enable fast and accurate responses. The fluency of these processes is reinforcing, meaning that easy-to-perceive objects are liked more as a result of misattribution of the reinforcement affect to the object identity. However, some critical processes are disfluent, yet their completion can be reinforcing leading to object preference through a different route. One such example is identification of objects from camouflage. In a series of 5 experiments, we manipulated object contrast and camouflage to explore the relationship between object preference to perceptual fluency and ambiguity solution. We found that perceptual fluency dominated the process of preference assessment when objects are assessed for "liking". That is, easier-to-perceive objects (high-contrast and noncamouflaged) were preferred over harder-to-perceive objects (low-contrast and camouflaged). However, when objects are assessed for "interest", the disfluent yet reinforcing ambiguity solution process overrode the effect of perceptual fluency, resulting in preference for the harder-to-perceive camouflaged objects over the easier-to-perceive noncamouflaged objects. The results have implications for preference and choice in a wide range of contexts by demonstrating the competition between perceptual fluency and ambiguity solution on preference, and by highlighting the critical factor of the form of preference decision. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Easy on the mind, easy on the wrongdoer? No evidence for perceptual fluency effects on moral wrongness ratings

Processing fluency—the subjective ease of information processing—influences a variety of judgments (e.g., judgments of familiarity, liking, and truth). A study by Laham, Alter, and Goodwin (2009) suggests that this is also true for moral judgments. More specifically, the authors found that discrepant perceptual fluency mitigates moral wrongness ratings. In five studies (total N = 694), we tested the replicability of this finding for different kinds of scenarios (moral versus conventional transgressions) and different perceptual fluency manipulations. In Studies 1a and 1b we manipulated fluency by text background, in Studies 2a and 2b by font type, and in Study 3 by word spaces. Critically, none of the studies replicated Laham et al.'s discrepant fluency effect on moral wrongness ratings. In turn, we found that moral wrongness ratings were strongly affected by participants' emotional responses to the scenarios. Taken together, the findings of our five studies cast very strong doubt on perceptual fluency effects on moral judgments.

Perceptual fluency effects in judgments of creativity and beauty: creative objects are perceived fluently yet they are visually complex

ABSTRACTPerceptual fluency typically has a positive influence on aesthetic evaluations of beauty, but few studies have examined its influence on creativity evaluations. Creativity has two facets, originality and quality. If creativity judgments involve estimating product originality, such judgments may be associated with perceptual disfluency, while product quality may be associated with perceptual fluency. We examined the relationship between perceptual fluency and judgments of creativity and beauty across seven experiments. Creativity judgments were affected by most perceptual fluencysources. We observed a highly-fluent-is-beautiful-and-creative relation when testing repeated exposure and figure-ground contrast. Prototypicality displayed a high-fluency–is-beautiful relation, with creativity judgments unaffected. Visual complexity displayed a consistent disfluent-is-creative effect, with mixed results for beauty. For creativity (but not beauty) evaluations, increased saliency of visual complexity led to discounting fluent-is-creative effects, supporting the hypothesis that there are at least two fluency pathways to creativity judgments that take both originality and quality into account.

A hard to read font reduces the causality bias

AbstractPrevious studies have demonstrated that fluency affects judgment and decision-making. The purpose of the present research was to investigate the effect of perceptual fluency in a causal learning task that usually induces an illusion of causality in non-contingent conditions. We predicted that a reduction of fluency could improve accuracy in the detection of non-contingency and, therefore, could be used to debias illusory perceptions of causality. Participants were randomly assigned to either an easy-to-read or a hard-to-read condition. Our results showed a strong bias (i.e., overestimation) of causality in those participants who performed the non-contingent task in the easy-to-read font, which replicated the standard causality bias effect. This effect was reduced when the same task was presented in a hard-to-read font. Overall, our results provide evidence for a reduction of the causality bias when presenting the problem in a hard-to-read font. This suggests that perceptual fluency affects causal judgments.

The effect of perceptual fluency on overcoming the interference of the More A-More B intuitive rule among primary school students in a perimeter comparison task: the perspective of cognitive load

Recent research has shown that reducing the perceptual fluency of shape processing can be an effective means for overcoming the interference of the More A-More B intuitive rule among grade 3 students in a perimeter comparison task. From the perspective of cognitive load, the current study focused on the mechanism of perceptual fluency on overcoming the interference of the More A-More B intuitive rule among grade 3 students in a perimeter comparison task. The existing studies have suggested that perceptual disfluency will inevitably increase ECL in the task-solving process and thus potentially detrimental toward learning. However, we could argue that overcoming the interference of the More A-More B intuitive rule in the disfluent condition could be interpreted as a simultaneous increase in cognitive GCL. Because of the theoretically complementary relationship between ECL and GCL, two experiments were designed to respectively examine ECL and GCL under different perceptual fluency conditions in the perimeter comparison task. Experiment 1 (N = 33) used a dual-task paradigm to examine participants’ ECL, manipulating the clarity of shapes. The results indicated that participants experienced significantly less interference from the More A-More B intuitive rule under the low-perceptual-fluency condition than under the high-perceptual-fluency condition, while ECL was significantly higher under the former condition than under the latter one. Experiment 2 (N = 72) explored GCL in the perimeter comparison task through a self-designed transfer test, using an identical manipulation method of perceptual fluency as in experiment 1. Compared to the high-perceptual-fluency group, participants in the low-perceptual-fluency group performed significantly better in the perimeter comparison task and transfer test. It was concluded that low perceptual fluency resulted in participants’ ECL while at the same time producing GCL during completion of the perimeter comparison task.

Metamemory and memory for a wide range of font sizes: What is the contribution of perceptual fluency?

Words printed in a larger 48-point font are judged to be more memorable than words printed in a smaller 18-point font, although font size does not affect actual memory. To clarify the basis of this font size effect on metamemory and memory, 4 experiments investigated how presenting words in 48 (Experiment 1) or 4 (Experiments 2 to 4) font sizes between 6 point and 500 point affected judgments of learning (JOLs) and recall performance. Response times in lexical decision tasks were used to measure perceptual fluency. In all experiments, perceptual fluency was lower for words presented in very small and very large font sizes than for words presented in intermediate font sizes. In contrast, JOLs increased monotonically with font size, even beyond the point where a large font impaired perceptual fluency. Assessments of people's metacognitive beliefs about font size revealed that the monotonic increase in JOLs was not due to beliefs masking perceptual fluency effects (Experiment 3). Also, JOLs still increased across the whole range of font sizes when perceptual fluency was made salient at study (Experiment 4). In all experiments but Experiment 4, recall performance increased with increasing font size, although to a lesser extent than JOLs. Overall, the current study supports the idea that metacognitive beliefs underlie font size effects in metamemory. As important, it reveals that people's font size beliefs have some accuracy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

On belief and fluency in the construction of judgments of learning: Assessing and altering the direct effects of belief

A current debate in metamemory research considers the roles of fluency (Rhodes & Castel, 2008) and belief cues (Mueller, Dunlosky, & Tauber, 2015) in the construction of judgments of learning (JOLs). Under the fluency hypothesis, the processing fluency drives the construction of JOLs. The belief-based hypothesis instead asserts a strong influence of belief. The current study directly influences participants' beliefs to observe the effects on metacognitive judgments of learning. Experiment 1A attempted to variably strengthen participants' beliefs about the font-size effect: participants were informed of research implying a superiority of large-fonts in memory and between study cycles were given differing levels of feedback on the relationship between font-size and their performance. A reliable replication of the font-size effect was found, though there were no appreciable differences due to feedback. Experiment 1B introduced a counter-belief that small-fonts are superior in terms of memory recall, and participants showed minimal effects of font-size on JOLs and none on memory. Finally, in Experiment 2 participants underwent a baseline condition with no belief manipulation and then an experimental condition that manipulated beliefs as in Experiments 1A and 1B. The results provide clear confirmatory evidence for the effects of belief on JOLs, though these data neither support a pure fluency hypothesis nor a pure belief-based hypothesis. We discuss an additive effect of perceptual fluency and belief on JOLs, and present possible mechanisms that may interact to influence and bias JOLs.

Further boundary conditions for the effects of perceptual disfluency on judgments of learning

The experience of fluency while learning might bias students’ metacognitive judgments of learning (JOLs) and impair the efficacy of their study behaviors. In the present experiments, we examined whether perceptual fluency affects JOLs (1) when people only experience one level of fluency, (2) when item relatedness is also available as a cue, and (3) across study-test trials. Participants studied a list of paired associates over two study-test trials and made JOLs for each item after studying it. We varied the perceptual fluency of the memory materials by making the font easy (fluent) or difficult (disfluent) to read. We also varied whether we manipulated the perceptual fluency of the items between-participants or within-participants and whether other memory factors—item relatedness and study time—were available for participants to use to inform their JOLs. We were only able to obtain effects of perceptual fluency on JOLs when we manipulated fluency within-participants and eliminated item relatedness as a cue for JOLs. The present results indicate that some effects of perceptual fluency on JOLs are not robust and might only occur under limited—and somewhat contrived—conditions. Therefore, these effects might be unlikely to bias students’ JOLs in actual learning situations.

If it's hard to read, it changes how long you do it: reading time as an explanation for perceptual fluency effects on judgment.

Perceptual manipulations, such as changes in font type or figure-ground contrast, have been shown to increase judgments of difficulty or effort related to the presented material. Previous theory has suggested that this is the result of changes in online processing or perhaps the post-hoc influence of perceived difficulty recalled at the time of judgment. These two experiments seek to examine by which mechanism (or both) the fluency effect is produced. Results indicate that disfluency does in fact change in situ reading behavior, and this change significantly mediates judgments. Eye movement analyses corroborate this suggestion and observe a difference in how people read a disfluent presentation. These findings support the notion that readers are using perceptual cues in their reading experiences to change how they interact with the material, which in turn produces the observed biases.

The effects of list composition and perceptual fluency on judgments of learning (JOLs)

The perceptual fluency hypothesis proposes that items that are easier to perceive at study will be given higher memorability ratings, as compared with less fluent items. However, prior research has examined this metamemorial cue primarily using mixed-list designs. Furthermore, certain memory effects are moderated by the design (mixed list vs. pure list) used to present stimuli. The present study utilized mixed as well as pure lists to assess whether judgments of learning based on perceptual fluency are relative or absolute and whether people are sensitive to differences in recall produced by variation in list composition. Using font size and generation manipulations, Experiments 1 and 2 showed that the effect of perceptual fluency on metamemory is relative in nature, occurring only in mixed lists. Experiments 2 and 3 revealed that metamemory is insensitive to the effect of list composition on recall. These findings are consistent with the assumptions of Koriat's (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 126: 349-370, 1997) cue-utilization framework, that JOLs reflect a comparative process and are insensitive to cues pertaining to conditions of learning.

The role of answer fluency and perceptual fluency as metacognitive cues for initiating analytic thinking

Although widely studied in other domains, relatively little is known about the metacognitive processes that monitor and control behaviour during reasoning and decision-making. In this paper, we examined the conditions under which two fluency cues are used to monitor initial reasoning: answer fluency, or the speed with which the initial, intuitive answer is produced (Thompson, Prowse Turner, & Pennycook, 2011), and perceptual fluency, or the ease with which problems can be read (Alter, Oppenheimer, Epley, & Eyre, 2007). The first two experiments demonstrated that answer fluency reliably predicted Feeling of Rightness (FOR) judgments to conditional inferences and base rate problems, which subsequently predicted the amount of deliberate processing as measured by thinking time and answer changes; answer fluency also predicted retrospective confidence judgments (Experiment 3b). Moreover, the effect of answer fluency on reasoning was independent from the effect of perceptual fluency, establishing that these are empirically independent constructs. In five experiments with a variety of reasoning problems similar to those of Alter et al. (2007), we found no effect of perceptual fluency on FOR, retrospective confidence or accuracy; however, we did observe that participants spent more time thinking about hard to read stimuli, although this additional time did not result in answer changes. In our final two experiments, we found that perceptual disfluency increased accuracy on the CRT (Frederick, 2005), but only amongst participants of high cognitive ability. As Alter et al.’s samples were gathered from prestigious universities, collectively, the data to this point suggest that perceptual fluency prompts additional processing in general, but this processing may results in higher accuracy only for the most cognitively able.

The effect of perceptual fluency and enduring involvement on situational involvement in an online apparel shopping context

PurposeCasual online shoppers without a strong intention to purchase items can easily leave web sites within seconds. However, there is little research examining how and why consumers are engaged momentarily when they are exposed to a target stimulus in a low involvement shopping situation. This online experiment study seeks to investigate the possibility of enhancing situational involvement with personal and stimulus factors, namely enduring involvement and perceived perceptual fluency, and to determine how enjoyment contributes to the relations among enduring involvement, perceptual fluency, cognitive effort, and situational involvement, in a low‐involvement online shopping context.Design/methodology/approachAn online experiment was conducted to test the conceptual model. Two mock web sites with different levels of perceptual fluency were developed to test effects of perceptual fluency on situational involvement, and participants completed an online survey after viewing one on the web site.FindingsStructural equation modeling was performed to test the proposed model (n=657). The result confirmed that perceived perceptual fluency elicited enjoyment, which in turn positively affected situational involvement, purchase intention, and cognitive effort. Enduring involvement influences enjoyment, cognitive effort, and purchase intention in a web‐browsing situation. Enjoyment plays a key role by mediating the perceptual fluency effect and enduring involvement effect on purchase intention and cognitive effort. The findings of the current study demonstrated that perceptual fluency of a stimulus could engage people by enhancing enjoyment.Originality/valueThe current study provides an insight into comprehensively understanding how situational involvement can be created through visual information display/web site design as well as a personal factor. The study uniquely approaches the issue of involvement and engagement through internal, psychological process of consumers. Also, the empirical support for the proposed model successfully extends the perceptual fluency hypothesis, contributing to the field of literature.

Smooth trajectories travel farther into the future: Perceptual fluency effects on prediction of trend continuation

This research examines how processing fluency influences people's perceptions of whether a trend will continue into the future. Specifically, three studies hypothesized that people who read descriptions of increasing or decreasing trends in easy-to-read font would be more likely to predict that the trend would continue into the future, compared to people exposed to difficult-to-read font. Studies 1 and 2 establish this effect for an increasing trend, whereas Study 3 replicates the findings with a decreasing trend. Taken together, these results suggest processing fluency as a factor that affects assessment of future potential.

Do Blurred Faces Magnify Priming Effects? The Interactive Effects of Perceptual Fluency and Priming on Impression Formation

How do subtle subliminal cues such as perceptual fluency (e.g., the visual clarity of a face) and priming influence the way we form impressions of people? In this experiment, participants (N = 114) received an affective priming manipulation, and then viewed sharp (perceptually fluent) or slightly blurred (disfluent) photographs of target individuals. Impressions were assessed on a trait checking task, a trait rating task, and open-ended descriptions, and processing latency was also measured. Results indicated that both positive primes and greater fluency increased the positivity of impressions. In an interesting pattern, priming effects were greater for perceptually disfluent (blurred) faces, consistent with disfluent images also triggering more elaborate, constructive, and longer processing. These results are discussed in terms of the important and so far little understood interactive role of priming and fluency cues in impression formation judgments in everyday life.

A rose in any other font would not smell as sweet: Effects of perceptual fluency on categorization

Fluency – the ease with which people process information – is a central piece of information we take into account when we make judgments about the world. Prior research has shown that fluency affects judgments in a wide variety of domains, including frequency, familiarity, and confidence. In this paper, we present evidence that fluency also plays a role in categorization judgments. In Experiment 1, participants judged a variety of different exemplars to be worse category members if they were less fluent (because they were presented in a smaller typeface). In Experiment 2, we found that fluency also affected judgments of feature typicality. In Experiment 3, we demonstrated that the effects of fluency can be reversed when a salient attribution for reduced fluency is available (i.e., the stimuli are hard to read because they were printed by a printer with low toner). In Experiment 4 we replicated these effects using a within-subject design, which ruled out the possibility that the effects were a statistical artifact caused by aggregation of data. We propose a possible mechanism for these effects: if an exemplar and its category are closely related, activation of one will cause priming of the other, leading to increased fluency. Over time, feelings of fluency come to be used as a valid cue that can become confused with more traditional sources of information about category membership.

Fluency, Familiarity, Aging, and the Illusion of Truth

ABSTRACT Research has shown that repeated statements are rated as more credible than new statements. However, little research has examined whether such “illusions of truth” can be produced by contextual (nonmnemonic) influences, or compared to the magnitude of these illusions in younger and older adults. In two experiments, we examined how manipulations of perceptual and conceptual fluency influenced truth and familiarity ratings made by young and older adults. Stimuli were claims about companies or products varying in normative familiarity. Results showed only small effects of perceptual fluency on rated truth or familiarity. In contrast, manipulating conceptual fluency via semantic/textual context had much larger effects on rated truth and familiarity, with the effects modulated by normative company familiarity such that fluency biases were larger for lesser-known companies. In both experiments, young and older adults were equally susceptible to fluency-based biases.

Effects of Perceptual Fluency on Judgments of Truth

Statements of the form “Osorno is in Chile” were presented in colors that made them easy or difficult to read against a white background and participants judged the truth of the statement. Moderately visible statements were judged as true at chance level, whereas highly visible statements were judged as true significantly above chance level. We conclude that perceptual fluency affects judgments of truth.