Multiple context mere exposure: Examining the limits of liking

Abstract

Recent evidence suggests that increased liking of exposed stimuli—a phenomenon known as the mere exposure effect—is dependent on experiencing the stimuli in the same context at exposure and test. Three experiments extended this work by examining the effect of presenting target stimuli in single and multiple exposure contexts. Target face stimuli were repeatedly paired with nonsense words, which took the role of contexts, across exposure. On test, the mere exposure effect was found only when the target face stimuli were presented with nonsense word cues (contexts) with which they had been repeatedly paired. The mere exposure effect was eliminated when exposure to target face stimuli with the nonsense word cues (contexts) was minimal, despite the overall number of exposures to the target face being equated across single- and multiple-context exposure conditions. The results suggest that familiarity of the relationship between stimuli and their context, not simply familiarity of the stimuli themselves, leads to liking. The finding supports a broader framework, which suggests that liking is partly a function of the consistency between past and present experiences with a target stimulus.

Keywords:

• Mere exposure
• Familiarity
• Novelty
• Fluency
• Affect
• Context

Notes

¹The term “context” has been used broadly in the memory literature. Context can refer to the environment in which the experiment is located, such as the exposure and test rooms (Smith, Glenberg, & Bjork, 1978), specific properties of the environment, such as the colour of the background and the position of target stimuli within it (Murane & Phelps, 1994), and other stimuli that precede or co-occur with the target stimulus such as images (Gruppuso, Lindsay, & Masson, 2007) or words (Tulving & Thomson, 1973), which is the category that describes our use of the term “context”. We note that the learning literature may exclude from its definition of context some of these categories by including only low salience, background stimuli that have a long duration.

²The experiment referred to here is described in Footnote 2 of de Zilva et al. (2013). Full details of this experiment are available from the authors.