People often choose intuitive rather than equally valid nonintuitive alternatives. The authors suggest that these intuitive biases arise because intuitions often spring to mind with subjective ease, and the subjective ease leads people to hold their intuitions with high confidence. An investigation of predictions against point spreads found that people predicted intuitive options more often than equally valid nonintuitive alternatives. Critically, though, this effect was largely determined by people's confidence in their intuitions. Across naturalistic, expert, and laboratory samples, against personally (...) determined point spreads, and even when intuitive confidence was manipulated by altering irrelevant aspects of the decision context, the authors found that decreasing intuitive confidence reduced or eliminated intuitive biases. These findings indicate that intuitive biases are not inevitable but rather predictably determined by contextual variables that affect intuitive confidence. (shrink)

Against the prior view that primate communication is based only on signal decoding, comparative evidence suggests that primates are able, no less than humans, to intentionally perform or understand impulsive or habitual communicational actions with a structured evaluative nonconceptual content. These signals convey an affordance-sensing that immediately motivates conspecifics to act. Although humans have access to a strategic form of propositional communication adapted to teaching and persuasion, they share with nonhuman primates the capacity to communicate in impulsive or habitual ways. (...) They are also similarly able to monitor fluency, informativeness and relevance of messages or signals through nonconceptual cues. (shrink)

Current theories assume that perception and affect are separate realms of the mind. In contrast, we argue that affect is a genuine online-component of perception instantaneously mirroring the success of different perceptual stages. Consequently, we predicted that the success (failure) of even very early and cognitively encapsulated basic visual Processing steps would trigger immediate positive (negative) affective responses. To test this assumption, simple visual stimuli that either allowed or obstructed early visual processing stages without participants being aware of this were (...) presented briefly. Across 5 experiments, we found more positive affective responses to stimuli that allowed rather than obstructed Gestalt completion at certain early visual stages (Experiments 1–3; briefest presentation 100 ms with post-mask), and visual disambiguation in possible vs. impossible Necker cubes (Experiments 4 and 5; briefest presentation 100 ms with post-mask). This effect was observed both on verbal preference ratings (Experiments 1, 2, and 4) and as facial muscle responses occurring within 2–4 s after stimulus onset (zygomaticus activity; Experiments 3 and 7). For instance, in participants unaware of spatial possibility we found affective discrimination between possible and impossible Necker cubes (the famous Freemish Crate) for 100 ms presentation timings, although a conscious discrimination took more than 2000 ms (Experiment 4). (shrink)

Mangan's concept of fringe consciousness is too heavily based on informal introspection, and too all-embracing to constitute a coherent family. It lacks the tight operationalisation needed to identify individual examples of fringe consciousness, and to test Mangan's theoretical account against detailed findings from empirical research. I propose a more focused two-component operationalisation of the fringe. The first component addresses how we can operationalise the consciousness of the fringe; here I draw lessons from research in implicit cognition, and suggest implications for (...) the wider understanding of consciousness. The second component addresses the informational content of the fringe. (shrink)

We extend Mangan's account of fringe consciousness by discussing our work on processing experiences. Our research shows that variations in speed at different stages of perceptual processing can jointly contribute to subjective processing ease, supporting Mangan's notion that different mental processes condense into one subjective experience. We also discuss our studies showing that facilitation of perceptual processing leads to positive affect, supporting Mangan's suggestion that an evaluative component is built into cognitive phenomenology. Finally, we review research demonstrating that people draw (...) on processing experiences to make a variety of judgments, supporting Mangan's emphasis on the functional importance of cognitive feelings. (shrink)

Radical skepticism is the view that we know nothing or at least next to nothing. Nearly no one actually believes that skepticism is true. Yet it has remained a serious topic of discussion for millennia and it looms large in popular culture. What explains its persistent and widespread appeal? How does the skeptic get us to doubt what we ordinarily take ourselves to know? I present evidence from two experiments that classic skeptical arguments gain potency from an interaction between two (...) factors. First, people evaluate inferential belief more harshly than perceptual belief. Second, people evaluate inferential belief more harshly when its content is negative (i.e., that something is not the case) than when it is positive (i.e., that something is the case). It just so happens that potent skeptical arguments tend to focus our attention on negative inferential beliefs, and we are especially prone to doubt that such beliefs count as knowledge. That is, our cognitive evaluations are biased against this specific combination of source and content. The skeptic sows seeds of doubt by exploiting this feature of our psychology. (shrink)

The mere exposure phenomenon (repeated exposure to a stimulus is sufficient to improve attitudes toward that stimulus) is one of the most inspiring phenomena associated with Robert Zajonc’s long and productive career in social psychology. In the first part of this article, Richard Moreland (who was trained by Zajonc in graduate school) describes his own work on exposure and learning, and on the relationships among familiarity, similarity, and attraction in person perception. In the second part, Sascha Topolinski (a recent graduate (...) who never met Zajonc, but found his ideas inspirational) describes his own work concerning embodiment and fluency in the mere exposure effect. Also, several avenues for future research on the mere exposure phenomenon are identified, further demonstrating its continuing relevance to the field. (shrink)

Recent debates on mental extension and distributed cognition have taught us that environmental resources play an important and often indispensable role in supporting cognitive capacities. In order to clarify how interactions between the mind –particularly memory– and the world take place, this paper presents the “selection problem” and the “endorsement problem” as structural problems arising from such interactions in cases of mental scaffolding. On the one hand, the selection problem arises each time an agent is confronted with a cognitive problem, (...) since she has to choose whether to solve it internally or externally. How does she choose? On the other hand, when confronted with the internally or externally retrieved solution to a cognitive task, the subject has to decide whether to endorse the information. How does the subject decide whether to endorse it or not? The last section proposes a solution to each problem in terms of metamemory and metacognitive feelings. Metamemory evaluates memory each time the subject is confronted with a memory task and elicits either a positive or negative metacognitive feeling that guides the decision. (shrink)

A major challenge for Dual Process Theories of reasoning is to predict the circumstances under which intuitive answers reached on the basis of Type 1 processing are kept or discarded in favour of analytic, Type 2 processing (Thompson 2009 ). We propose that a key determinant of the probability that Type 2 processes intervene is the affective response that accompanies Type 1 processing. This affective response arises from the fluency with which the initial answer is produced, such that fluently produced (...) answers give rise to a strong feeling of rightness. This feeling of rightness, in turn, determines the extent and probability with which Type 2 processes will be engaged. Because many of the intuitions produced by Type 1 processes are fluent, it is common for them to be accompanied by a strong sense of rightness. However, because fluency is poorly calibrated to objective difficulty, confidently held intuitions may form the basis of poor quality decisions. (shrink)

Many epistemologists use intuitive responses to particular cases as evidence for their theories. Recently, experimental philosophers have challenged the evidential value of intuitions, suggesting that our responses to particular cases are unstable, inconsistent with the responses of the untrained, and swayed by factors such as ethnicity and gender. This paper presents evidence that neither gender nor ethnicity influence epistemic intuitions, and that the standard responses to Gettier cases and the like are widely shared. It argues that epistemic intuitions are produced (...) by the natural ‘mindreading’ capacity that underpins ordinary attributions of belief and knowledge in everyday social interaction. Although this capacity is fallible, its weaknesses are similar to the weaknesses of natural capacities such as sensory perception. Experimentalists who do not wish to be skeptical about ordinary empirical methods have no good reason to be skeptical about epistemic intuitions. (shrink)

This article combines findings from cognitive psychology on the role of processing fluency in truth judgments with epistemological theory on justification of belief. We first review evidence that repeated exposure to a statement increases the subjective ease with which that statement is processed. This increased processing fluency, in turn, increases the probability that the statement is judged to be true. The basic question discussed here is whether the use of processing fluency as a cue to truth is epistemically justified. In (...) the present analysis, based on Bayes’ Theorem, we adopt the reliable-process account of justification presented by Goldman (1986) and show that fluency is a reliable cue to truth, under the assumption that the majority of statements one has been exposed to are true. In the final section, we broaden the scope of this analysis and discuss how processing fluency as a potentially universal cue to judged truth may contribute to cultural differences in commonsense beliefs. (shrink)

The subjective impression that statements are true increases when statements are presented repeatedly. There are two sources for this truth effect: An increase in validity based on recollection and increase in processing fluency due to repeated exposure . Using multinomial processing trees , we present a comprehensive model of the truth effect. Furthermore, we show that whilst the increase in processing fluency is indeed automatic, the interpretation and use of that experience is not. Experiment 1 demonstrates the standard use of (...) the fluency experience and Experiment 2 demonstrates that people can change the interpretation of the experience according to its ecological validity. By implication, the truth effect represents the adaptive usage of feedback received from internal processes. (shrink)

Zeki and co-workers recently proposed that perception can best be described as locally distributed, asynchronous processes that each create a kind of microconsciousness, which condense into an experienced percept. The present article is aimed at extending this theory to metacognitive feelings. We present evidence that perceptual fluency—the subjective feeling of ease during perceptual processing—is based on speed of processing at different stages of the perceptual process. Specifically, detection of briefly presented stimuli was influenced by figure-ground contrast, but not by symmetry (...) or the font of the stimuli. Conversely, discrimination of these stimuli was influenced by whether they were symmetric and by the font they were presented in , but not by figure-ground contrast. Both tasks however were related with the subjective experience of fluency . We conclude that subjective fluency is the conscious phenomenal correlate of different processing stages in visual perception. (shrink)

Four studies explore the role of perceptual fluency in attenuating bullshit receptivity, or the tendency for individuals to rate otherwise meaningless statements as “profound”. Across four studies, we presented participants with a sample of pseudoprofound bullshit statements in either a fluent or disfluent font and found that overall, disfluency attenuated bullshit receptivity while also finding little evidence that this effect was moderated by cognitive thinking style. In all studies, we measured participants’ cognitive reflection, need for cognition, faith in intuition, and (...) superstitious beliefs. Superstition strongly predicted bullshit receptivity regardless of fluency. Inconclusive results were found for the remaining scales. Potential links for the role of perceptual disfluency in promoting analytic thinking are discussed. (shrink)

Adam Carter (2022) recently proposed that a successful analysis of knowledge needs to include an autonomy condition. Autonomy, for Carter, requires a lack of a compulsion history. A compulsion history bypasses one’s cognitive competences and results in a belief that is difficult to shed. I argue that Carter’s autonomy condition does not cover partially autonomous beliefs properly. Some belief-forming processes are partially bypassing one’s competences, but not bypassing them completely. I provide a case for partially autonomous belief based on processing (...) fluency effects and argue that partially autonomous beliefs only amount to knowledge in some cases. I finally suggest how to adjust the autonomy condition to capture partially autonomous belief properly. (shrink)

The English language now dominates scientific communications. Yet, many scientists have English as their second language. Their English proficiency may therefore often be more limited than that of a ‘native speaker’, and their scientific contributions (e.g. manuscripts) in English may frequently contain linguistic features that disrupt the fluency of a reader’s, or listener’s information processing even when the contributions are understandable. Scientific gatekeepers (e.g. journal reviewers) sometimes cite these features to justify negative decisions on manuscripts. Such justifications may rest on (...) the prima facie plausible assumption that linguistic characteristics that hinder fast and easy understandability of scientific contributions are epistemically undesirable in science. I shall raise some doubts about this assumption by drawing on empirical research on processing fluency and its biasing effects. I also argue that directing scientists with English as a foreign language toward approaching ‘native-level’ English can have the negative consequence of reducing their potential to make scientific belief formation more reliable. These points suggest that one seemingly compelling justification for linguistically discriminating against scientific contributions in ‘non-native’ English is questionable and that the common insistence by scientific gatekeepers on ‘native-like’ English may be epistemically harmful to science. (shrink)

The color of green product advertisements is an important factor affecting consumers’ preferences. Based on the theory of the self-control system, this paper explores the influence mechanism and boundary conditions of green product ad color on consumers’ preferences through three experiments. Experiment 1 tested the effect of advertisement color type on consumers’ preferences for green products. The results show that color ad can promote consumers’ preferences for green products compared with green ad. Experiment 1 also analyzed the mediating role of (...) the self-control system between advertisement color type and consumers’ preferences. Experiment 2 further clarified the boundary of the main effect. The effect of ad color on consumers’ preferences was only effective in the context of green products. Experiment 3 explored the moderating effect of green product type on the main effect. The results show that only when the green product type is altruistic, the ad color type can significantly affect consumers’ preferences. This study is the first to link the ad color of green products with consumers’ preferences. The findings confirm that the use of color ad for green products can elicit higher consumers’ preferences than pure green ad, which enriches the research on the color of green product advertisements. (shrink)

Pritchard defends virtue epistemology from epistemic situationism by appealing to the notion of epistemic dependence: if knowledge acquisition is sometimes allowed to depend on factors outside the cognitive agency of the subject, then this modest form of virtue epistemology escapes the threat of the situationist challenge. This lowering of the threshold of cognitive agency required for knowledge raises the question of how to demarcate between acquisitions of true belief influenced by situational factors that count as knowledge, and those that do (...) not. I fill this gap by proposing that the dependence of knowledge acquisition on external factors comes in degrees, which allows us to look for a right degree of epistemic dependence such that it both agrees with the situationist research and preserves the normative appeal of virtue epistemology. (shrink)

A vexing problem in contemporary epistemology—one with origins in Plato’s Meno—concerns the value of knowledge, and in particular, whether and how the value of knowledge exceeds the value of mere true opinion. The recent literature is deeply divided on the matter of how best to address the problem. One point, however, remains unquestioned: that if a solution is to be found, it will be at the personal level, the level at which states of subjects or agents, as such, appear. We (...) take exception to this orthodoxy, or at least to its unquestioned status. We argue that subpersonal states play a significant—arguably, primary—role in much epistemically relevant cognition and thus constitute a domain in which we might reasonably expect to locate the “missing source” of epistemic value, beyond the value attached to mere true belief. (shrink)

Over the last few decades, empirical researchers have become increasingly interested in explaining the formation of “basic” aesthetic judgments, i.e. simple judgments of sensory preferability and the pleasure that seems to accompany them. To that end, Reber et al. have recently defended a “processing-fluency” view, which identifies aesthetic pleasure with one’s ability to easily process an object’s perceptual properties (e.g. Reber 2012 ). While the processing-fluency theory is certainly an improvement over its competitors, it is currently vulnerable to several serious (...) criticisms. In what follows, I aim to provide a more holistic, explanatorily robust, model of the processing-fluency theory of aesthetic pleasure by incorporating what the view neglects: the crucial role of perceptual disfluency, interest, and the underlying values that drive aesthetic appraisal. (shrink)

From antiquity through the twentieth century, philosophers have hypothesized that, intuitively, it is harder to know negations than to know affirmations. This paper provides direct evidence for that hypothesis. In a series of studies, I found that people naturally view negations as harder to know than affirmations. Participants read simple scenarios and made judgments about truth, probability, belief, and knowledge. Participants were more likely to attribute knowledge of an outcome when framed affirmatively than when framed negatively. Participants did this even (...) though the affirmative and negative framings were logically equivalent. The asymmetry was unique to knowledge attributions: it did not occur when participants rated truth, probability, or belief. These findings show new consequences of negation on people’s judgments and reasoning and can inform philosophical theorizing about the ordinary concept of knowledge. (shrink)

ABSTRACTPresenting information in a coherent fashion has been shown to increase processing fluency, which in turn influences affective responses. The pattern of responses have been explained by two...

An influential argument in bioethics involves appeal to disgust, calling on us to take it seriously as a moral guide (e.g. Kass, Miller, Kahan). Some argue, for example, that genetic enhancement, especially via human reproductive cloning, is repellant or grotesque. While objectors have argued that repugnance is morally irrelevant (e.g. Nussbaum, Kelly), I argue that the problem is more fundamental: it is psychologically irrelevant. Examining recent empirical data suggests that disgust’s influence on moral judgment may be like fatigue: an exogenous (...) influence, yielding a “performance error” that does not reflect our understanding of moral matters. This conclusion also challenges appeals to repugnance on other topics (such as homosexuality) and generally downplays the importance of disgust in moral discourse. (shrink)

Thinking of models in science as fictions is said to be helpful, not merely because models are known or assumed to be false, but because work on the nature of fiction helps us understand what models are and how they work. I am unpersuaded. For example, instead of trying to assimilate truth-in-a model to truth-in-fiction we do better to see both as special and separate cases of the more general notion truth-according-to-a-corpus. Does enlightenment go the other way? Do we better (...) understand fiction's capacity to generate knowledge by thinking of it as a kind of modelling? If we see, as we should, fictions and models are parts of larger patterns of cognitive activity that include institutional frameworks, the best answer is no. (shrink)

Perceptual fluency is the subjective experience of ease with which an incoming stimulus is processed. Although perceptual fluency is assessed by speed of processing, it remains unclear how objective speed is related to subjective experiences of fluency. We present evidence that speed at different stages of the perceptual process contributes to perceptual fluency. In an experiment, figure-ground contrast influenced detection of briefly presented words, but not their identification at longer exposure durations. Conversely, font in which the word was written influenced (...) identification, but not detection. Both contrast and font influenced subjective fluency. These findings suggest that speed of processing at different stages condensed into a unified subjective experience of perceptual fluency. (shrink)

Five experiments explored how source reliability influences people’s tendency to rate statements as more credible when they were encountered earlier . Undergraduates read statements from one reliable source and one unreliable source. Statements read multiple times were perceived as more valid and were more often correctly identified on a general knowledge test than statements read once or not at all. This occurred at varying retention intervals whether the statements originated from a reliable or unreliable source, when people had little memory (...) for the statements themselves or their source, and when the discrediting information about the sources came either before or after reading the facts. While repetition aided recognition and source accuracy, both were unaffected by the reliability of the source. Consistent with the source monitoring framework, familiarity may create an illusion of truth for statements when people lack source-specifying cues, especially cues regarding the reliability of the source. (shrink)

The objective of this study was to explore the participants’ processing strategies on the mere exposure effect, object decision priming and explicit recognition. In Experiments 1, we observed that recognition and the mere exposure effect for unfamiliar three-dimensional objects were not dissociated by plane rotations in the same way as recognition and object decision priming. However, we showed that, under identical conditions, prompting analytic processing at testing produced a large plane rotation effect on recognition and the mere exposure effect similar (...) to that observed for object decision priming . Furthermore, inducing a non-analytic processing strategy at testing produced a reduced plane rotation effect on recognition and object decision , similar to that observed for the mere exposure effect. These findings suggest that participants’ processing strategies influence performance on the three tasks. (shrink)

Perceptual fluency is the subjective experience of ease with which an incoming stimulus is processed. Although perceptual fluency is assessed by speed of processing, it remains unclear how objective speed is related to subjective experiences of fluency. We present evidence that speed at different stages of the perceptual process contributes to perceptual fluency. In an experiment, figure-ground contrast influenced detection of briefly presented words, but not their identification at longer exposure durations. Conversely, font in which the word was written influenced (...) identification, but not detection. Both contrast and font influenced subjective fluency. These findings suggest that speed of processing at different stages condensed into a unified subjective experience of perceptual fluency. (shrink)

Radical skepticism is the view that we know nothing, or at least next to nothing. Nearly no one actually believes that skepticism is true. Yet it has remained a serious topic of discussion for millennia and it looms large in popular culture. What explains its persistent and widespread appeal? How does the skeptic get us to doubt what we ordinarily take ourselves to know? I present evidence from two experiments that classic skeptical arguments gain potency from an interaction between two (...) factors. First, people evaluate inferential belief more harshly than perceptual belief. Second, people evaluate inferential belief more harshly when its content is negative (i.e. that something is not the case) than when it’s positive (i.e. that something is the case). It just so happens that potent skeptical arguments tend to focus our attention on negative inferential beliefs, and we are especially prone to doubt that such beliefs count as knowledge. That is, our cognitive evaluations are biased against this specific combination of source and content. The skeptic sows seeds of doubt by exploiting this feature of our psychology. (shrink)

In this issue of Cognition, Thompson and her colleagues challenge the results from a paper we published several years ago. That paper demonstrated that metacognitive difficulty or disfluency can trigger more analytical thinking as measured by accuracy on several reasoning tasks. In their experiments, Thompson et al. find evidence that people process information more deeply—but not necessarily more accurately—when they experience disfluency. These results are consistent with our original theorizing, but the authors misinterpret it as counter-evidence because they suggest that (...) accuracy is a measure of deeper processing rather than a contingent outcome of such processing. We further suggest that Thompson et al. err when they discriminate between “perceptual fluency” and “answer fluency,” the former of which is an element of the latter. Thompson et al. advance research by adding reaction time as a measure of deeper cognitive processing, but we caution against misinterpreting the meaning of accuracy. (shrink)

While there is now considerable anxiety about whether the psychological theory presupposed by virtue ethics is empirically sustainable, analogous issues have received little attention in the virtue epistemology literature. This paper argues that virtue epistemology encounters challenges reminiscent of those recently encountered by virtue ethics: just as seemingly trivial variation in context provokes unsettling variation in patterns of moral behavior, trivial variation in context elicits unsettling variation in patterns of cognitive functioning. Insofar as reliability is a condition on epistemic virtue, (...) we have reason to doubt that human beings possess the cognitive materials required for epistemic virtue, and thereby reason to think that virtue epistemology is threatened by skepticism. We conclude that while virtue epistemology has resources for addressing this challenge, exploiting these resources forces tradeoffs between empirical and normative adequacy. (shrink)

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, and perceptual fluency, or the ease with which problems can be read. The first two experiments demonstrated that answer fluency reliably predicted Feeling of Rightness 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. 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., 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, 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. (shrink)

Conviction Narrative Theory holds that reasoners adopt “a narrative that feels ‘right’ to explain the available data” and use “that narrative to imagine plausible futures” (target article, Abstract). Drawing on feelings-as-information theory, this commentary reviews the role of metacognitive experiences of ease or difficulty and highlights that fluently processed narratives are more likely to “feel right.”.

From antiquity through the twentieth century, philosophers have hypothesized that, intuitively, it is harder to know negations than to know affirmations. This paper provides direct evidence for that hypothesis. In a series of studies, I found that people naturally view negations as harder to know than affirmations. Participants read simple scenarios and made judgments about truth, probability, belief, and knowledge. Participants were more likely to attribute knowledge of an outcome when framed affirmatively than when framed negatively. Participants did this even (...) though the affirmative and negative framings were logically equivalent. The asymmetry was unique to knowledge attributions: it did not occur when participants rated truth, probability, or belief. These findings show new consequences of negation on people’s judgments and reasoning and can inform philosophical theorizing about the ordinary concept of knowledge. (shrink)

Is formal simplicity a guide to learning in humans, as simplicity is said to be a guide to the acceptability of theories in science? Does simplicity determine the difficulty of various learning tasks? I argue that, similarly to how scientists sometimes preferred complex theories when this facilitated calculations, results from perception, learning and reasoning suggest that formal complexity is generally unrelated to what is easy to learn and process by humans, and depends on assumptions about available representational and processing primitives. (...) “Simpler” hypotheses are preferred only when they are also easier to process. Historically, “simpler”, easier‐to‐process, scientific theories might also be preferred if they are transmitted preferentially. Empirically viable complexity measures should build on the representational and processing primitives of actual learners, even if explanations of their behaviour become formally more complex. (shrink)