You can feel it all over: Many signals potentially contribute to feelings of familiarity.

Abstract Voss, Lucas, and Paller provide a thought-provoking summary of their recent research showing that neural effects which are often attributed to (explicit) feelings of familiarity can instead be attributed to the (implicit) effects of conceptual priming. Here, we discuss research that shows effects of priming on (putative) behavioral and neural measures of familiarity, and consider a slightly different interpretation: That multiple neurocognitive processes can serve as signals to prior experience with a test item (i.e., can influence judgments of familiarity), and the set of signals that will be interpreted as familiarity depends on the experimental context.