The fact of having already encountered something encourages future preference, a phenomenon known as the mere exposure effect (MEE). There is a widely accepted view that recognition inhibits the MEE. Here this view is contested and the generality of the findings upon which it is based questioned. New evidence is presented from a systematic investigation of the moderating influence of recognitio...

A meta-analysis of research on Zajonc's (1968) mere exposure effect indicated that stimuli perceived without awareness produce substantially larger exposure effects than do stimuli that are consciously perceived (Bornstein, 1989a). However, this finding has not been tested directly in the laboratory. Two experiments were conducted comparing the magnitude of the exposure effect produced by 5-ms ...

Zajonc's thesis that "mere exposure" enhances attitudes is both novel and intriguing. In its general form, this hypothesis seems to challenge the time-honored maxim of Familiarity breeds contempt, and rejects the traditional reinforcement theory whereby positive adient responses are established through conditioning and association. Zajonc presents two main lines of evidence in support of his hy...

The goal-gradient hypothesis (Hull 1934) denotes the classic finding from behaviorism that animals expend more effort as they approach a reward (e.g., hungry rats run faster as they near cheese). Building on this hypothesis, we generate new propositions for the human psychology of rewards. We test these propositions using a variety of methods, data, and modeling approaches, including field expe...

The computational creativity community (rightfully) takes a dim view of supposedly creative systems that operate by mere generation. However, what exactly this means has never been adequately defined, and therefore the idea of requiring systems to exceed this standard is problematic. Here, we revisit the question of mere generation and attempt to qualitatively identify what constitutes exceedin...

People’s reactions to coincidences are often cited as an illustration of the irrationality of human reasoning about chance. We argue that coincidences may be better understood in terms of rational statistical inference, based on their functional role in processes of causal discovery and theory revision. We present a formal definition of coincidences in the context of a Bayesian framework for ca...

With the advances of analytical sensitivity, it is now possible to detect a DNA profile from minute quantity of DNA. It opens new investigative avenues (in cold cases for example), but also new interpretative challenges. Here, forensic scientists deal with items bearing DNA cellular material from areas showing no visible stain and have limited means to identify the nature of the body fluid invo...

It is widely believed that humans are endowed with a specialized numerical process, called subitizing, which enables them to apprehend rapidly and accurately the numerosity of small sets of objects. A major part of the evidence for this process is a purported discontinuity in the mean response time (RT) versus numerosity curves at about 4 elements, when subjects enumerate up to 7 or more elemen...