Illusions of familiarity.

@article{Whittlesea1993IllusionsOF,
  title={Illusions of familiarity.},
  author={Bruce W. A. Whittlesea},
  journal={Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition},
  year={1993},
  volume={19},
  pages={1235-1253}
}
  • B. W. Whittlesea
  • Published 1 November 1993
  • Psychology
  • Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition
Feelings of familiarity are not direct products of memory. Although prior experience of a stimulus can produce a feeling of familiarity, that feeling can also be aroused in the absence of prior experience if perceptual processing of the stimulus is fluent (e.g., Whittlesea, Jacoby, & Girard, 1990). This suggests that feelings of familiarity arise through an unconscious inference about the source of processing fluency. The present experiments extend that conclusion. First, they show that a wide… 
View via Publisher
www2.psych.ubc.ca
854 Citations
Highly Influential Citations
87
Background Citations
441
Methods Citations
49
Results Citations
34

Figures and Tables from this paper

854 Citations

Illusions of face memory : Clarity breeds familiarity q
When people perform a recognition memory task, they may avail themselves of different forms of information. For example, they may recall specific learning episodes, or rely on general feelings of…
Illusions of face memory: Clarity breeds familiarity.
The inferential basis of familiarity and recall: Evidence for a common underlying process
Recognition can be performed either by experiencing a feeling of familiarity for a stimulus or by recalling contextual detail of a prior episode. These bases of recognition occur under different…
Are affective events richly recollected or simply familiar? The experience and process of recognizing feelings past.
  • K. Ochsner
  • Psychology
    Journal of experimental psychology. General
  • 2000
TLDR
Data suggest that greater recollection for affective events leads them to be more richly experienced in memory, and they are consistent with the idea that the states of remembering and knowing are experientially exclusive, whereas the processes underlying them are functionally independent.
Attributions of Fluency: Familiarity, Preference, and the Senses
Consumer judgement and decision making is guided by phenomenological experiences (Whittlesea, 1997), also called ‘non- emotional feelings’ (Clore, 1992) associated with cognitions. These feelings,…
Implicit /explicit memory versus analytic/nonanalytic processing: Rethinking the mere exposure effect
TLDR
It is suggested that when study opportunities are minimal and test items are perceptually similar, people adopt an analytic approach, attempting to recognize distinctive features, but that that strategy fails because rapid presentation prevents effective encoding of such features; it also prevents people from experiencing fluency and a consequent feeling of familiarity.
The effect of processing fluency on impressions of familiarity and liking.
TLDR
The results suggest that, within a given context, participants adopt a single interpretation for fluency, and the sense of familiarity that arises from fluent processing overshadows thesense of positivity, thus questioning aspects of the hedonic marking hypothesis.
False memory and the discrepancy-attribution hypothesis: the prototype-familiarity illusion.
TLDR
The experiments showed that studying associates enhances semantic, but not perceptual, processing of prototypes, and that claims of recognizing prototypes can be modified by presenting them in predictive or incongruous contexts at test.
Making sense and nonsense of experience: Attributions in memory and judgment
The discrepancy-attribution hypothesis: I. The heuristic basis of feelings of familiarity.
TLDR
The authors provide convergent evidence for the discrepancy-attribution hypothesis and show that it can also explain feelings of familiarity for nonlinguistic stimuli and demonstrate that the perception of discrepancy is not automatic but instead depends critically on the attitude that people adopt toward their processing, given the task and context.
...
...

References

SHOWING 1-10 OF 37 REFERENCES
Illusions of immediate memory: evidence of an attributional basis for feelings of familiarity and perceptual quality
Becoming Famous Overnight: Limits on the Ability to Avoid Unconscious Influences of the Past
Nonfamous names presented once in an experiment are mistakenly judged as famous 24 hr later. On an immediate test, no such false fame occurs. This phenomenon parallels the sleeper effect found in…
Unconscious Influences of Memory for a Prior Event
TLDR
This work presents experiments in which memory used as a tool enhances perception, lowers the subjective experience of background noise, increases the fame of nonfamous names, and lowers estimates of the difficulty of anagrams.
An illusion of memory: false recognition influenced by unconscious perception
The results of two experiments showed that an illusion of memory can be produced by unconscious perception. In a first phase of those experiments, a long list of words was presented for study. For…
Remembering the data: analyzing interactive processes in reading
Recognizing: The judgment of previous occurrence.
Several suggestions for a class of theories of recognition memory have been proposed during the past decade. These models address predictions about judgments of prior occurrence of an event, not the…
On the relationship between autobiographical memory and perceptual learning.
TLDR
The experiments that are reported were designed to explore the relationship between the more aware autobiographical form of memory that is measured by a recognition memory test and the less aware form ofMemory that is expressed in perceptual learning.
Memory influences subjective experience: Noise judgments.
The influence of memory on the subjective experience of later events was investigated in two experiments. In one experiment, previously heard sentences and new sentences were presented against a…
Perceptual Fluency and Recognition Judgments
Items seen for the second time in an experiment (old items) can be perceived more readily (fluently) than items seen for the first time (new items) (e.g., Jacoby & Dallas, 1981). We hypothesized that…
The effect of a prior presentation on temporal judgments in a perceptual identification task
TLDR
The results indicate that duration judgments provide a valuable dependent measure of memory in the perceptual identification task and support the misattribution hypothesis: A prior presentation enhances perceptual identification, and this increase in relative perceptual fluency is incorrectly attributed to a longer presentation duration.
...
...