The source of feelings of familiarity: The discrepancy-attribution hypothesis.

Abstract

Many investigators have observed that the feeling of familiarity is associated with fluency of processing. The authors demonstrated a case in which the feeling of familiarity did not result from fluency per se; they argued that it resulted instead from perceiving a discrepancy between the actual and expected fluency of processing (B. W. A. Whittlesea & L. D. Williams, 1998). In this article, the authors extend that argument. They observed that stimuli that are experienced as strongly familiar when presented in isolation are instead experienced as being novel when presented in a rhyme or semantic context. They interpreted that result to mean that in those other contexts, the subjects brought a different standard to bear in evaluating the fluency of their processing. This different standard caused the subjects to perceive their performance not as discrepant, but as coherent in one case and incongruous in the other. The authors suggest that the perception of discrepancy is a major factor in producing the feeling of familiarity. They further suggest that the occurrence of that perception depends on the task in which the person is engaged when encountering the stimulus, because that task affects the standard that the person will apply in evaluating their processing.

Judgments of duration, figure-ground contrast, and size for words and nonwords

“…In recent years, the role of expectation and attribution in moderating the effects of fluency on judgments has been examined (Westerman, Lloyd, & Miller, 2002;Whittlesea & Williams, 1998, 2000, 2001. Whittlesea and Williams (1998), for example, demonstrated that enhanced perceptual fluency does not necessarily result in higher familiarity.…”

“…In Experiment 5, we added more orthographically regular nonwords to the stimuli in order to test the discrepancyattribution hypothesis (Whittlesea & Williams, 1998, 2000, 2001 for duration judgments. According to this hypothesis, perceptual fluency is attributed to the judgment at hand only if there is a discrepancy between expected fluency and actual fluency.…”

Accurate forced-choice recognition without awareness of memory retrieval

“…One way fluency has been studied is with stimuli slowly emerging from noise (gradual unmasking), wherein the speed or fluency of item identification appears to be related to the tendency to report that the item had been seen previously (Verfaellie and Cermak 1999;Conroy et al 2005). Other methods have also been used to show that fluency can provoke "old" responses in recognition tests (e.g., Jacoby and Whitehouse 1989;Whittlesea and Williams 2000;Kleider and Goldinger 2004). Importantly, a bias to call fluently processed stimuli "old" can readily occur for stimuli not previously viewed (e.g., Verfaellie and Cermak 1999).…”

Functional neuroimaging of autobiographical memory

“…In another fMRI study (Garoff, et al, 2005), encoding activity in the right fusiform gyrus (but not in the left fusiform) predicted memory for specific perceptual properties of stimuli. Thus, the right fusiform gyrus seems to be involved in processing item-specific perceptual information, which might underlie familiarity processes (Jacoby & Dallas, 1981;Whittlesea & Williams, 2000) (although see Voss & Paller, 2006). The role of the right fusiform gyrus in temporal-order decisions for longer lags might reflect greater reliance on perceptual aspects of the information during distance judgments.…”