99,684 research outputs found

    A general model of fluency effects in judgment and decision making

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    Processing or cognitive fluency is the experienced ease of ongoing mental processes. This experience infl uences a wide range of judgments and decisions. We present a general model for these fluency effects. Based on Brunswik’s lens-model, we conceptualize fluency as a meta-cognitive cue. For the cue to impact judgments, we propose three process steps: people must experience fluency; the experience must be attributed to a judgment-relevant source; and it must be interpreted within the judgment context. This interpretation is either based on available theories about the experience’s meaning or on the learned validity of the cue in the given context. With these steps the model explains most fl uency effects and allows for new and testable predictions

    Processing Fluency Affects Behavior More Strongly among People Higher in Trait Mindfulness

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    Processing fluency is the ease of processing information about a stimulus, which people can attribute to the experience of enjoyment. Despite consistent findings that processing fluency can affect self-reported judgments, little research has examined whether processing fluency or its interactions with personality traits can affect behavior. The current studies demonstrate that processing fluency is more likely to affect behavior among people higher in trait mindfulness. We manipulated processing fluency with rhyming versus nonrhyming maxims in Study 1 and with regulatory fit versus nonfit in Study 2. Participants higher in mindfulness showed a stronger positive effect for processing fluency on the dependent variable: the number of ideas they listed in a task they continued for as long as they enjoyed it

    Metaphor Aptness And Conventionality: A Processing Fluency Account

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    Conventionality and aptness are two dimensions of metaphorical sentences thought to play an important role in determining how quick and easy it is to process a metaphor. Conventionality reflects the familiarity of a metaphor whereas aptness reflects the degree to which a metaphor vehicle captures important features of a metaphor topic. In recent years it has become clear that operationalizing these two constructs is not as simple as asking naïve raters for subjective judgments. It has been found that ratings of aptness and conventionality are highly correlated, which has led some researchers to pursue alternative methods for measuring the constructs. Here, in four experiments, we explore the underlying reasons for the high correlation in ratings of aptness and conventionality, and question the construct validity of various methods for measuring the two dimensions. We find that manipulating the processing fluency of a metaphorical sentence by means of familiarization to similar senses of the metaphor (“in vivo conventionalization”) influences ratings of the sentence\u27s aptness. This misattribution may help explain why subjective ratings of aptness and conventionality are highly correlated. In addition, we find other reasons to question the construct validity of conventionality and aptness measures: for instance, we find that conventionality is context dependent and thus not attributable to a metaphor vehicle alone, and we find that ratings of aptness take more into account than they should

    A coordinate-based ALE functional MRI meta-analysis of brain activation during verbal fluency tasks in healthy control subjects

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    BACKGROUND: The processing of verbal fluency tasks relies on the coordinated activity of a number of brain areas, particularly in the frontal and temporal lobes of the left hemisphere. Recent studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the neural networks subserving verbal fluency functions have yielded divergent results especially with respect to a parcellation of the inferior frontal gyrus for phonemic and semantic verbal fluency. We conducted a coordinate-based activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analysis on brain activation during the processing of phonemic and semantic verbal fluency tasks involving 28 individual studies with 490 healthy volunteers. RESULTS: For phonemic as well as for semantic verbal fluency, the most prominent clusters of brain activation were found in the left inferior/middle frontal gyrus (LIFG/MIFG) and the anterior cingulate gyrus. BA 44 was only involved in the processing of phonemic verbal fluency tasks, BA 45 and 47 in the processing of phonemic and semantic fluency tasks. CONCLUSIONS: Our comparison of brain activation during the execution of either phonemic or semantic verbal fluency tasks revealed evidence for spatially different activation in BA 44, but not other regions of the LIFG/LMFG (BA 9, 45, 47) during phonemic and semantic verbal fluency processing

    Processing Fluency in Education: How Metacognitive Feelings Shape Learning, Belief Formation, and Affect

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    Processing fluency—the experienced ease with which a mental operation is performed has attracted little attention in educational psychology, despite its relevance. The present article reviews and integrates empirical evidence on processing fluency that is relevant to school education. Fluency is important, for instance, in learning, self-assessment of knowledge, testing, grading, teacher–student communication, social interaction in the multicultural classroom, and emergence of interest. After a brief overview of basic fluency research we review effects of processing fluency in three broad areas: metacognition in learning, belief formation, and affect. Within each area, we provide evidence-based implications for education. Along the way, we offer fluency-based insights into phenomena that were long known but not yet sufficiently explained (e.g., the effect of handwriting on grading). Bringing fluency (back) to education may contribute to research and school practice alike

    Efficient Vengeance: The role of processing fluency in making decisions about retaliation

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    Aggressive behavior is a harmful and pervasive psychological and behavioral phenomenon. Inherent to every act of aggression are decisions regarding the modality, severity, and timing of such actions. Prevailing theories of aggression emphasize the role of cognitive processes in aggression, especially retaliatory aggression. Despite this emphasis, few cognitive processes have been examined for their possible involvement in making decisions about retaliatory aggression. Across two studies, I examined the role of processing fluency in making decisions about retaliation. I drew from contemporary models of aggression (e.g., the General Aggression Model) and processing fluency (e.g., the Multi-Source Account) to develop hypotheses in this novel extension of the aggression literature. Study 1 provided correlational evidence that processing fluency facilitates greater retaliation severity among vengeance-seekers and that such fluency linked with greater levels of antagonistic dispositions (i.e., Sadism). Study 2 extended these findings with a between-subjects experiment which provided evidence that induced angry rumination increased processing fluency for retaliation decisions, indirectly facilitating greater severity. Both studies also provided evidence that the Drift Diffusion Model can account for such decisions and that drift rate estimates are a valid measure of processing fluency. These findings hold major implications for contemporary theories of aggression and processing fluency, laboratory research, and clinical practice

    Underlying Skills of Oral and Silent Reading Fluency in Chinese: Perspective of Visual Rapid Processing

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    Reading fluency is a critical skill to improve the quality of our daily life and working efficiency. The majority of previous studies focused on oral reading fluency rather than silent reading fluency, which is a much more dominant reading mode that is used in middle and high school and for leisure reading. It is still unclear whether the oral and silent reading fluency involved the same underlying skills. To address this issue, the present study examined the relationship between the visual rapid processing and Chinese reading fluency in different modes. Fifty-eight undergraduate students took part in the experiment. The phantom contour paradigm and the visual 1-back task were adopted to measure the visual rapid temporal and simultaneous processing respectively. These two tasks reflected the temporal and spatial dimensions of visual rapid processing separately. We recorded the temporal threshold in the phantom contour task, as well as reaction time and accuracy in the visual 1-back task. Reading fluency was measured in both single-character and sentence levels. Fluent reading of single characters was assessed with a paper-and-pencil lexical decision task, and a sentence verification task was developed to examine reading fluency on a sentence level. The reading fluency test in each level was conducted twice (i.e., oral reading and silent reading). Reading speed and accuracy were recorded. The correlation analysis showed that the temporal threshold in the phantom contour task did not correlate with the scores of the reading fluency tests. Although, the reaction time in visual 1-back task correlated with the reading speed of both oral and silent reading fluency, the comparison of the correlation coefficients revealed a closer relationship between the visual rapid simultaneous processing and silent reading. Furthermore, the visual rapid simultaneous processing exhibited a significant contribution to reading fluency in silent mode but not in oral reading mode. These findings suggest that the underlying mechanism between oral and silent reading fluency is different at the beginning of the basic visual coding. The current results also might reveal a potential modulation of the language characteristics of Chinese on the relationship between visual rapid processing and reading fluency

    “I Will Follow You!” – How Recommendation Modality Impacts Processing Fluency and Purchase Intention

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    Although conversational agents (CA) are increasingly used for providing purchase recommendations, important design questions remain. Across two experiments we examine with a novel fluency mechanism how recommendation modality (speech vs. text) shapes recommendation evaluation (persuasiveness and risk), the intention to follow the recommendation, and how modality interacts with the style of recommendation explanation (verbal vs. numerical). Findings provide robust evidence that text-based CAs outperform speech-based CAs in terms of processing fluency and consumer responses. They show that numerical explanations increase processing fluency and purchase intention of both recommendation modalities. The results underline the importance of processing fluency for the decision to follow a recommendation and highlight that processing fluency can be actively shaped through design decisions in terms of implementing the right modality and aligning it with the optimal explanation style. For practice, we offer actionable implications on how to make effective sales agents out of CAs

    The Epistemic Status of Processing Fluency as Source for Judgments of Truth

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    This article combines findings from cognitive psychology on the role of processing fluency in truth judgments with epistemological theory on justification of belief. We first review evidence that repeated exposure to a statement increases the subjective ease with which that statement is processed. This increased processing fluency, in turn, increases the probability that the statement is judged to be true. The basic question discussed here is whether the use of processing fluency as a cue to truth is epistemically justified. In the present analysis, based on Bayes’ Theorem, we adopt the reliable-process account of justification presented by Goldman (1986) and show that fluency is a reliable cue to truth, under the assumption that the majority of statements one has been exposed to are true. In the final section, we broaden the scope of this analysis and discuss how processing fluency as a potentially universal cue to judged truth may contribute to cultural differences in commonsense beliefs

    The use of executive fluency tasks to detect cognitive impairment in individuals with subjective cognitive decline

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    Objective: Although evidence has indicated that subjective cognitive decline (SCD) may be an early sign of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), the objectification of cognitive impairment in SCD is challenging, mainly due to the lack of sensitivity in assessment tools. The present study investigated the potential contribution of two verbal fluency tasks with high executive processing loads to the identification of cognitive impairment in SCD. Methods: A total of 60 adults with SCD and 60 healthy controls (HCs) performed one free action (verb) fluency task and two fluency tasks with more executive processing load—an alternating fluency task and an orthographic constraint fluency task—and the results were compared. Result: In the free action fluency task, the performance of the participants with SCD and the HCs was similar. However, HCs performed significantly better than SCD in the alternating fluency task, which required mental flexibility, and the orthographic constraint fluency task, which required inhibition. Discussion: The study findings suggest that verbal fluency tasks with high executive processing load could be useful in detecting cognitive deficits at the preclinical stage of AD. The inclusion of such tests in assessment batteries should be considered in order to improve the detection of subtle cognitive impairment in preclinical major neurocognitive disorder populations
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