The relationship between the structural mere exposure effect and the implicit learning process

Abstract

Three experiments are reported that investigate the relationship between the structural mere exposure effect (SMEE) and implicit learning in an artificial grammar task. Subjects were presented with stimuli generated from a finite-state grammar and were asked to memorize them. In a subsequent test phase subjects were required first to rate how much they liked novel items, and second whether or not they thought items conformed to the rules of the grammar. A small but consistent effect of grammaticality was found on subjects' liking ratings (a "structural mere exposure effect") in all three experiments, but only when encoding and testing conditions were consistent. A change in the surface representation of stimuli between encoding and test (Experiment 1), memorizing fragments of items and being tested on whole items (Experiment 2), and a mismatch of processing operations between encoding and test (Experiment 3) all removed the SMEE. In contrast, the effect of grammaticality on rule judgements remained intact in the face of all three manipulations. It is suggested that rule judgements reflect attempts to explicitly recall information about training items, whereas the SMEE can be explained in terms of an attribution of processing fluency.

The subliminal mere exposure effect does not generalize to structurally related stimuli.

“…It is possible that some other types of stimuli might show generalization (perhaps those in which there is a generalization of surface structure rather than underlying grammatical rules -see Seamon & Delgado, 1999), thus our results do not unequivocally rule out a role for implicit responding in the mere exposure effect. However, the results do provide clear evidence that a structural mere exposure effect, which can be obtained when participants are aware of the presentation status of the stimuli (e.g., Gordon & Holyoak, 1983;Manza & Bornstein, 1995;Newell & Bright, 2001), disappears when they are unaware of this status.…”

“…The results of the recognition test indicate that the 100-ms exposure duration was sufficient to eliminate participants' ability to distinguish old from new grammatical strings. However, making participants unaware of the exposure status of the stimuli also appeared to eliminate the structural mere exposure effect -an effect previously found using longer exposure durations (e.g., Gordon & Holyoak, 1983;Manza & Bornstein, 1995;Newell & Bright, 2001). The results suggest that, contrary to Bornstein's (1994) conjecture, "subliminal" mere exposure effects do not generalize to structurally related material.…”

“…The reliable finding is that participants give consistently higher liking ratings to novel grammatical strings than novel ungrammatical strings. This finding has been interpreted as evidence that the positive affect produced by exposure to a set of stimuli generalizes to previously unseen stimuli that are structurally related (i.e., follow the rules of a grammar) to the exposed stimuli (Gordon & Holyoak, 1983;Manza & Bornstein, 1995;Newell & Bright, 2001).…”

“…Several authors have suggested that exploring the relation between implicit learning and mere exposure may provide a way of understanding the nature of the processes underlying the two phenomena (e.g., Gordon & Holyoak, 1983;Manza & Bornstein, 1995;Manza, Zizak, & Reber, 1998;Newell & Bright, 2001). Studies have used a variation of the widely researched artificial grammar paradigm to investigate whether the increase in affect observed for identical stimuli, generalizes to similar structurally related stimuli.…”

“…To answer this question, a procedure used recently to obtain reliable supraliminal structural mere exposure effects was modified. Newell and Bright (2001) reported that in three experiments participants exposed to grammatical strings during training gave novel grammatical strings reliably higher liking ratings than ungrammatical strings -a "structural mere exposure effect" (cf. Manza et al, 1999).…”