This study investigated whether perceptual fluency could affect duration judgments. Fluency refers to levels of subjective ease, in which stimuli can be processed (Lanska, Olds, & Westerman, 2014). The study was conducted with experimental within group factorial design. Visual stimuli were selected from Snodgrass and Vanderwarts (1980) standardized set of 260 pictures. Pairs were made with low and high levels of complexity. Duration was about 1000 milliseconds with .10 variations. 1/3 of pairs were without variation. Participants were asked to judge which image was presented for longest time. Total amount of participants was 37. Main hypothesis was that low levels of complexity would be judged, to a greater frequency, as having been presented for longer duration. Observed mean (M= 20.27, SD = 2.90) was slightly lower than level of chance (M = 21) and the difference was non significant, t(36) = -1.53, p > .13. The null hypothesis was not rejected.

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Previous studies have examined the effect of atypical speech pause on conversational fluency and how the conversational listener perceives the speaker. The present study investigated the effect of pause duration of increasing length and in differing sentential locations on listener perceptions of communicative effectiveness and speaker likability. One neurotypical male and one neurotypical female speaker recorded three sentences from the Quick Aphasia Battery, and artificial pauses of varying lengths (250 ms, 400 ms, 550 ms, 700 ms, 850 ms, and 1 sec) were inserted before the subject, verb, and object of each sentence. The six baseline (unmodified) sentences were also included among the stimuli. These samples were randomly interspersed among foil samples that consisted of 30-second recordings of six people with fluent and nonfluent aphasia of mild to moderate severity. Forty adult participants (24 females and 16 males) listened to and rated the modified and foil samples for communicative effectiveness and the perception of likability of the speaker. A review of the data revealed that pause location may negatively impact speaker likability depending on the gender of the speaker. However, due to the small sample size of speakers (one male and one female) and factors that were not controlled for in this study (e.g., speaker pitch, speech rate, resonance, articulation patterns), these results require validation through further research that utilizes a larger sample. As pause duration increased, both speaker likability and communicative effectiveness ratings decreased. These findings suggest that monitoring pause duration and location in preliminary fluency samples could be beneficial to assess fluency severity and determine appropriate treatment goals. Wordfinding treatment may want to focus on vocabulary words that serve the function of subjects and objects in sentences. Although there are limitations in the methodology and results of this preliminary study, it is hoped that this study combined with future research can help to inform assessment and treatment of people with aphasia and other neurophysiological disorders that lead to atypical pause.

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People use facial appearance to infer the social attributes of others. A primary indicator of facial attractiveness is prototypicality (the proximity of an object to its categorical central tendency); faces and objects closer to the central tendency are judged as more attractive. Perceptual fluency theory suggests that cognitive processing speed directly generates positive affect. This dissertation examined the relationships among attractiveness, prototypicality, and affective response in faces and non-face objects across adult and 8-year-old participants using a reaction time (RT) paradigm. RT predicted positive affect and disgust responses to facial stimuli. Of particular note are the series of complementary findings suggesting that reaction to unattractive faces may be both quantitatively (i.e., longer RT latencies) and qualitatively (i.e., judged to be less typical) different from high and medium attractive faces. These findings may help explain how appearance-based stereotypes are formed and maintained. / text

The advent of digital typography has seen the printed letter permeate many aspects of our world, due to its function as the visual manifestation of verbal language. However, few scientific researchers have paid attention to these innocuous and ubiquitous characters. Furthermore, existing typeface research has generally been divided into two strands: For nearly ninety years, communicators (writing, marketing, business, and design professionals) have made attempts to investigate how typefaces of different classes and styles might indicate different personalities to the viewer, and explored the notion of typeface appropriateness. More recently, psychologists have taken advantage of word processing software to manipulate perceptual fluency by changing the fonts of different documents, finding several interesting effects. In this study, two experiments were conducted, with the aim of acknowledging and synthesizing both lines of inquiry. In Experiment 1, a restaurant menu was printed with either an easy-to-read, fluent font or a difficult-to-read, disfluent font. It was expected that reading the disfluent font would influence participants’ (n = 110) choices from the menu as well as certain judgments about the dishes. However, there was only one significant effect, whereby participants who read the disfluent font expected to enjoy their chosen dessert less than those who read the fluent font. In Experiment 2, participants (n = 94) judged a person of the opposite sex using the Big Five Inventory, a measure of human personality. The target photograph was paired with a name set in one of two fonts (familiar and unfamiliar). Female participants rated the target higher on the factor of Openness when the name was printed in the novel font. The results of the current study indicate that to some extent, document designers may safely continue selecting typefaces through intuition, and do not necessarily need the supplementation of additional empirical research.