Processing fluency and distracter devaluation: does the processing of repeatedly presented distracters influence subjective liking?

Abstract

The mere exposure effect occurs when any repeated exposure to a stimulus leads to a preference for it, most likely through increased processing fluency. In contrast, distracters viewed during visual selective attention tasks become disliked. This is known as the distracter devaluation effect and poses a contradiction to the mere exposure effect. Participants were exposed to distracting stimuli for very brief periods (30ms) whilst engaged in difficult visual search tasks. Processing fluency was assessed using affective masked priming trials. Increased processing fluency due to the exposure to the distracting stimulus resulted in positive affect evidenced by interference with responses to negative words in the priming task. Conversely, subjective ratings of the distracter were more negative than those of novel shapes and related to stimulus features and orientation. These results indicate that the influence of increased processing fluency for visual stimuli is not always subjectively positive despite being implicitly positive.