Processing fluency: Difference between revisions

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Later research observed that high perceptual fluency increases the experience of [[positive affect]].<ref name=Reber1998/> Research with [[psychophysiological]] methods corroborated this positive effect on affective experience: easy-to-perceive stimuli were not only judged more positively but increased activation in the [[zygomaticus major muscle]], the so-called "smiling muscle".<ref name=Winkielman2001/> The notion that processing fluency is inherently positive led to the [[processing fluency theory of aesthetic pleasure]],<ref name=Reber2004/> and it has been used to explain people's negative reactions towards migrants, who appear to be more difficult to process than non-migrants.<ref name=Rubin2010/>

Other studies have shown that when presenting people with a factual statement, manipulations that make the statement easier to mentally process—even totally nonsubstantive changes like writing it in a cleaner [[font]] or making it [[rhyme]] or simply repeating it—can alter judgment of the truth of the statement, along with evaluation of the [[intelligence]] of the statement's author.<ref name=Bennett2010/> This is called the "[[illusion-of-illusory truth effect|illusion of truth]] effect". Multiple studies have found that subjects were more likely to judge easy-to-read statements as true.<ref name=Reber1999/><ref name=Newman2012/><ref name=Waldman2014/> This means that perceived beauty and judged truth have a common underlying experience, namely processing fluency. Indeed, experiments showed that [[beauty]] is used as an indication for the correctness of mathematical solutions. This supports the idea that beauty is intuitively seen as truth.<ref name=Reber2008/> Processing fluency may be one of the foundations of [[Intuition (knowledge)|intuition]]<ref name=Topolinski2009/> and the [[Eureka effect|"Aha!" experience]].<ref name=Topolinski2010/><ref name="Wray2011"/>

As high processing fluency indicates that the interaction of a person with the environment goes smoothly,<ref name="Winkielman2003"/> a person does not need to pay particular attention to the environment. By contrast, low processing fluency means that there are problems in the interaction with the environment which requires more attention and an analytical processing style to solve the problem. Indeed, people process information more shallowly when processing fluency is high and employ an analytical thinking style when processing fluency is low.<ref name=Alter2007/><ref name=Song2008/>