DOI: 10.6129/CJP.20120615
中華心理學刊 民101，54卷，4期，561-577
Chinese Journal of Psychology 2012, Vol.54, No.4, 561-577

Man-Ying Wang（Department of Psychology, Soochow University）；Kuan-Wu Lee（Department of Psychology, Soochow University）

Abstract

Mere repetition is sufficient to increase one’s liking towards an object (Zajonc, 1968), yet it is not clear whether
and how conditions accompanying item exposure or encoding may impact the mere exposure effect (MEE). Previous studies showed that attentional conditions in the encoding task can influence affective judgments (Griffiths & Mitchell, 2008; Raymond, Fenske, & Tavassoli, 2003; Yagi, Ikoma, & Kikuchi, 2009). This study examines whether the fluency of processing during encoding may mediate the mere exposure effect. Line-drawn, affectively neutral objects were presented in flanker displays that required naming responses in the study phase, followed by a test phase of liking judgments. Items that underwent ignored repetition in the study phase exhibited negative priming (NP) and thus disfluent processing, and they failed to produce reliable mere  exposure effects in the test phase. Equivalent MEEs were found for items in the attended repetition and control conditions (Experiment 1). Altering the display layouts between the prime and the probe trials diminished the NP effect and recovered the MEE in the ignored repetition condition (Experiment 2). Experiment 3 manipulated contextual similarity in a within-subject design and the results replicated findings of previous experiments. These findings support that encoding fluency does affect the MEE and it is directly linked to liking, which
impacts the resultant MEE.

Keywords: fluency, mere exposure effect, negative priming, repetition priming