Fluency Cues Research Articles

An Event-Related Potential Study on Differences Between Higher and Lower Easy of Learning Judgments: Evidence for the Ease-of-Processing Hypothesis.

Easy of learning (EOL) judgments occur before active learning begins, and it is a prediction of how difficult it will be to learn new material in future learning. This study compared the amplitude of event-related potential (ERP) components and brain activation regions between high and low EOL judgments by adopting ERPs with a classical EOL judgment paradigm, aiming to confirm the ease-of-processing hypothesis. The results showed that (1) the magnitudes of EOL judgments are affected by encoding fluency cues, and the judgment magnitude increases with encoding fluency; (2) low EOL judgments are associated with higher N400 amplitude at the left superior frontal gyrus (SFG) and left middle frontal gyrus (MFG). High EOL judgments showed enlarged slow-wave (600–1,000 ms) potentials than low EOL judgments at the left medial temporal lobe (MTL), right ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC), and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). Our results support the ease-of-processing hypothesis, particularly, by affirming that EOL judgments are affected by encoding fluency in two processing stages. N400 reflects the process of acquiring encoding fluency cues, while slow-wave indicates that individuals use encoding fluency cues for metacognitive monitoring.

Boosting Familiarity-Based Memory Decisions in Alzheimer's Disease: The Importance of Metacognition.

Recent studies in Alzheimer's disease (AD) have suggested that AD patients are not always able to rely on their feeling of familiarity to improve their memory decisions to the same extent as healthy participants. This underuse of familiarity in AD could result from a learned reinterpretation of fluency as a poor cue for memory that would prevent them to attribute a feeling of fluency to a previous encounter. The primary goal of this study was to determine whether AD patients could relearn the association between processing fluency and past exposure after being repeatedly exposed to situations where using this association improves the accuracy of their memory decisions. Thirty-nine patients with probable AD were recruited and asked to complete several recognition tests. During these tests, participants were put either in a condition where the positive contingency between fluent processing and previous encounters with an item was systematically confirmed (intervention condition) or in a condition where there was no correlation between fluency and prior exposure (control condition). The efficacy of the intervention was evaluated at three time points (baseline, posttest, and 3-month follow-up). Our results indicated that all AD patients do not benefit to the same extent from the training. Two variables appeared to influence the likelihood that participants increase and maintain their reliance on the fluency cues after the intervention: the ability to detect the fluency manipulation and the preservation of implicit metacognitive skills. These findings indicate the importance of metacognition for inferential attribution processes in memory.

Familiarity for entities as a sensitive marker of antero-lateral entorhinal atrophy in amnestic mild cognitive impairment

Alzheimer's disease (AD) symptomatology typically starts with memory deficits. Neurofibrillary tangles – one of the neuropathological hallmarks of AD – first affect the transentorhinal cortex (i.e., Brodmann's area 35 – BA35 and antero-lateral entorhinal cortex), a subregion of the antero-lateral parahippocampal region (also comprising BA36) currently hypothesized to serve as a functional hub representing entities. Here, we tested this hypothesis by investigating whether atrophy of antero-lateral parahippocampal subregions affects memory for entities. Patients with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI; known to be at high-risk of AD and to present with variable antero-lateral parahippocampal atrophy; N = 17) and healthy older control participants (N = 17) underwent a high-resolution MRI scan of the antero-lateral parahippocampal subregions and a visual object familiarity task, critically including three conditions with increasing need for entity-level representation: (1) letting all fluency cues contribute to familiarity, (2) precluding conceptual fluency, and (3) also precluding perceptual fluency, thereby directly tapping familiarity for entities. In aMCI, right antero-lateral entorhinal cortex specifically contributed to familiarity for entities, an association that was stronger than with familiarity in the ‘discriminative’ condition (2) (also precluding conceptual fluency, but tested in a viewpoint-dependent fashion as traditionally). In contrast, right BA36 specifically contributed to familiarity in the discriminative condition, an association that appeared marginally stronger than with familiarity for entities. These results shed new light on the functional hierarchy that may exist within the antero-lateral parahippocampal hub. Importantly, familiarity requiring an entity-level representation may specifically target transentorhinal integrity, opening a promising avenue to develop the still-lacking clinical marker of AD-related initial decline.

DOES PRODUCT CONTEXT COMPLEXITY MATTER IN (IN)CONGRUENT SHOP ENVIRONMENTS? THE INFLUENCE OF PROCESSING FLUENCY ON PRODUCT EVALUATION

DOES PRODUCT CONTEXT COMPLEXITY MATTER IN (IN)CONGRUENT SHOP ENVIRONMENTS? THE INFLUENCE OF PROCESSING FLUENCY ON PRODUCT EVALUATION

A Study of Korean Production and Fluency as a Foreign Language.

The study investigated what variables affected more on Korean raters` production and fluency judgement to the Korean speakings of the advanced foreign learners. Nine professional Korean raters assessed sixty Korean learners` oral performance. The results are as follows: (1) fluency judgement for the Korean speaking follows the cross-linguistic trends, (2) the principal variables in judging L2 fluency include speech rate, F0 range, and pause frequency, (3) mean length of runs (number of syllables) - representing how many words the subjects express within the given time - comparatively lower effect in judging the fluency. The study also found that the wide range of F0 causes the higher scores of the fluency marks. The result could support the evidence that F0 - exerting how the subjects express the active intonation - is one of the important production and fluency cues, regardless of the spectrum structure of the target language. The result implies that Korean speaking education should focus more on the active intonation. (Konkuk University, Seoul National University, Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul National University, Seogang University, Seoul National University, Seoul National University)

Increasing the salience of fluency cues does not reduce the recognition memory impairment in Alzheimer's disease!

In Alzheimer's disease (AD), it is now well established that recollection is impaired from the beginning of the disease, whereas findings are less clear concerning familiarity. One of the most important mechanisms underlying familiarity is the sense of familiarity driven by processing fluency. In this study, we attempted to attenuate recognition memory deficits in AD by maximizing the salience of fluency cues in two conditions of a recognition memory task. In one condition, targets and foils have been created from the same pool of letters (Overlap condition). In a second condition, targets and foils have been derived from two separate pools of letters (No-Overlap condition), promoting the use of letter-driven visual and phonetic fluency. Targets and foils were low-frequency words. The memory tasks were performed by 15 patients with AD and 16 healthy controls. Both groups improved their memory performance in the No-Overlap condition compared to the Overlap condition. Patients with AD were able to use fluency cues during recognition memory as older adults did, but this did not allow to compensate for dysfunction of recognition memory processes.

Why do highly visible people appear more important?: Affect mediates visual fluency effects in impression formation

People who are highly visible may be perceived as also more important and influential. Can good or bad moods influence the extent to which people rely on such irrelevant visual fluency cues when forming impressions? Based on recent work on affect and cognition, two experiments predicted and found that positive affect increased, and negative affect eliminated the effects of visual fluency on impressions. In Experiment 1, after an autobiographical mood induction participants read about two people whose visual fluency was factorially manipulated by changing the size and color of their photos. Both mood and visual fluency influenced impressions, and there was a significant mood by visibility interaction such that positive affect increased, and negative affect eliminated the effects of visual fluency. Experiment 2 replicated these results with a different mood induction, and also found that mood-induced differences in information processing style mediated these effects. The relevance of these findings for impression formation in everyday situations is considered, and their implications for recent affect–cognition theories are discussed.

The Effects of the Metacognitive Cue of Fluency on Evaluations about Taste Perception

The metacognitive cue of fluency is known to affect consumers’ evaluations and judgments (Schwarz, 2004). We questioned whether this effect extends to perceived taste experiences, and whether knowledge moderates the effect of fluency on taste evaluations. Across 3 experiments we demonstrate that the metacognitive cue of fluency is used by consumers in evaluating their taste experiences. Whereas disfluent cues are associated with lower taste evaluations for a utilitarian product (Experiment 1), disfluent cues are associated with higher taste evaluations for a hedonic product, especially for knowledgeable consumers (Experiment 2), when compared to a no-label (control) condition. Fluency cues that are intrinsic to the product (e.g., ingredients) however do not have the same effect on judgment about hedonic products (Experiment 3). These findings are important for designing product labels.

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.

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.

Discrimination and reliance on conceptual fluency cues are inversely related in patients with mild Alzheimer's disease

Prior work suggests that patients with mild Alzheimer's disease (AD) often base their recognition memory decisions on familiarity. It has been argued that conceptual fluency may play an important role in the feeling of familiarity. In the present study we measured the effect of conceptual fluency manipulations on recognition judgments of patients with mild AD and older adult controls. “Easy” and “hard” test conditions were created by manipulating encoding depth and list length to yield high and low discrimination, respectively. When the two participant groups performed identical procedures, AD patients displayed lower discrimination and greater reliance on fluency cues than controls. However, when the discrimination of older adult controls was decreased to the level of AD patients by use of a shallow encoding task, we found that controls reliance on fluency did not statistically differ from AD patients. Furthermore, we found that increasing discrimination using shorter study lists resulted in AD patients decreasing their reliance on fluency cues to a similar extent as controls. These findings support the notion that patients with AD are able to attribute conceptual fluency to prior experience. In addition, these findings suggest that discrimination and reliance on fluency cues may be inversely related in both AD patients and older adult controls.

The Effects of Encoding Fluency and Retrieval Fluency on Children's with-Learning Disabilities Judgements of Learning

There is much controversy on the psychological mechanism of Judgements of learning (JOLs). Cue-utilization approach proposed by Koriat considers that most of the cues can be grouped into three classes: intrinsic, extrinsic, and mnemonic. Both intrinsic and extrinsic cues may affect JOLs directly, and they may also exert their effect indirectly through their influence on any of the internal, mnemonic cues. The theory can explain successfully the bases or implications of JOLs from a broad perspective, but it can not state the way how individuals make JOLs. Meanwhile, some researchers proposed encoding fluency and retrieval fluency to explain and examine their effects on JOLs during leaning process, which are helpful for researchers to probe into the psychological mechanism of JOLs deeply. In addition, some research focused on children with learning disabilities (LD) found that, compared to their normal peers, lower metacognitive accuracy was one of their important characteristics. However, most of research was descriptive, and can not provide suitable targeted direction for educational practices. According to these, the present study would examine the different effects of different fluency cues on children with LD to find their specific influencial patterns. Twenty children with LD and twenty normal children selected from a common primary school (Mean age = 10.5 years) participated in the experiment to make item-by-item JOLs for paired words presented using a PC. This study examined the effects of encoding fluency (inferred from self-paced study time) and retrieval fluency (inferred from the latency of pre-JOL retrieval) on JOLs, wihch were elicited either immediately after study or after a short or longer delay. Results showed that: (1) Children with LD mainly utilized retrieval fluency to make JOL across immediate and delay conditions. However, for normal children, it showed some distinction between encoding and retrieval fluency as potential cues for JOL across immediate and delay conditions. (2)As a kind of JOLs cues, encoding fluency was more valid than retrieval fluency with immediate JOLs condition, whereas retrieval fluency validity increased with JOLs delay. Based on the above all results, normal children's JOLs are based on the flexible and adaptive utilization of different mnemonic cues according to their relative validity in predicting their final recall, whereas the cues children's with LD JOLs based on are not comparably flexible.

Differential impairment in semantic, phonemic, and action fluency performance in Friedreich's ataxia: Possible evidence of prefrontal dysfunction

This study examined phonemic (letters), semantic (animals) and action verbal fluency cues in twenty-four patients with FRDA, and twenty matched healthy control subjects. The Action Fluency Test (AFT) is a newly-developed verbal fluency cue that consists in asking the subject to rapidly generate verbs. Given the high presence of dysarthria and cognitive slowness in FRDA patients, control tasks were administered in order to dissociate motor/articulatory impairment and cognitive slowness from verbal fluency deficit. Results showed that patients and control subjects performed similarly on the semantic fluency task. In contrast, patients performed significantly poorer on phonemic and action fluency tests. Correlational analyses showed that the deficits cannot be attributed to dysarthria or cognitive slowness. Although executive processes are necessary for initiating and monitoring all verbal fluency tasks, phonemic and action fluency may place a greater burden on strategic processes, given that they require a more unusual type of lexicon search. Thus, the deficits found occur in tasks that require greater executive/prefrontal control. This impairment might be the result of an affectation of cerebellum-prefrontal cortex connections, although the possibility of a primary prefrontal dysfunction remains to be investigated.

Increasing the salience of fluency cues reduces the recognition memory impairment in amnesia

The present study examined whether the recognition memory deficit in amnesia would be attenuated under conditions that increased the salience of study-induced fluency. Studied and unstudied items were drawn either from separate pools of letters (no-overlap condition) or from the same pool of letters (overlap condition). Study-induced fluency was more salient in the no-overlap than in the overlap condition, because in the no-overlap condition, such fluency occurred at the letter level as well as at the word level. The recognition memory impairment in amnesia was smaller in the no-overlap than in the overlap condition. These findings are consistent with the idea that enhancing the salience of fluency cues promotes reliance on a fluency heuristic that ordinarily is not fully engaged in amnesia, and reduces the recognition memory impairment in amnesia.

Patients with mild Alzheimer's disease attribute conceptual fluency to prior experience

Patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) have been found to be relatively dependent on familiarity in their recognition memory judgments. Conceptual fluency has been argued to be an important basis of familiarity. This study investigated the extent to which patients with mild AD use conceptual fluency cues in their recognition decisions. While no evidence of recognition memory was found in the patients with AD, enhanced conceptual fluency was associated with a higher rate of “Old” responses (items endorsed as having been studied) compared to when fluency was not enhanced. The magnitude of this effect was similar for patients with AD and healthy control participants. Additionally, ERP recordings time-locked to test item presentation revealed preserved modulations thought critical to the effect of conceptual fluency on test performance (N400 and late frontal components) in the patients with AD, consistent with the behavioral results. These findings suggest that patients with mild AD are able to use conceptual fluency in their recognition judgments and the neural mechanisms supporting such processing is maintained.

Client Expectations for Fluency versus Actual Speech Performance in and Outside the Clinic following Treatment for Stuttering

A major problem of the behavioural oriented stuttering therapies concerns the transfer and maintenance of treatment skills. One aspect of this problem involves the type of assessment that should be conducted in order to evaluate the success of therapy. Many researchers and clinicians have questioned the use of clinic assessment as valid indicators of non-clinic performance. It is believed that the clinic imposes a fluency enhancing effect, thus resulting in a clinic sample that does not reflect non-clinic performance. Factors that may well be operating as fluency cues include the supportive atmosphere engendered by the clinician(s), client beliefs in the therapy, rapport with the clinician and the relatively constant stimulus situation. In order to investigate this clinic versus non-clinic issue, research was conducted 10 months following stuttering therapy exploring the relationship between telephone fluency inside and outside the clinic setting. Subjects' expectancies about their speech performance insi...