Fluency needs uncertainty M Forster, G Gerger, H Leder |
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Faculty of Psychology, University of Vienna, Austria
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| Processing fluency, that is to say, the ease with which a stimulus is processed, has strong influences on preference. The easier a stimulus is to process, the higher the preference judgment. This effect has been observed for line drawings, simple patterns, or words. In contrast, some studies using more complex stimuli, such as faces or artworks, fail to find a relation between fluency and preference. We suggest that these divergent findings owe to different degrees of uncertainty in the experimental settings. Uncertainty can be manipulated, for example, by hampering perception or varying the subjectivity of rating dimensions. In our experiments we studied the effect of perceptual fluency on different stimulus categories and rating dimensions. For simple line drawings, results suggest that fluency effects require a certain amount of uncertainty due to both stimulus perceptibility and rating dimension. Specifically, fluency effects were observed for hard to perceive stimuli and only when using a more subjective rating. This indicates that uncertainty might be a prerequisite for the fluency effect. Furthermore these results can explain why a fluency effect was not found in certain studies that used more complex material than line drawings or simple patterns. |
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