Fluency of processing – the ease with which one extracts information from stimuli – affects a variety of cognitive processes over and above the influence of declarative content. Although this influence has been extensively demonstrated in a variety of different domains (Alter & Oppenheimer, 2009), there are virtually no studies exploring this effect with auditory material. Moreover, although research on modality differences suggests that people process auditory information differently than they process visual or written information (Conway & Gathercole, 1987; Markman, Taylor & Gentner, 2007), there are no studies that directly compare the effects of processing fluency on judgments across different modalities. The current dissertation reports two sets of studies, one investigating the effects of processing fluency on cognitive judgments in the auditory modality, and a second exploring cross-modal differences in processing fluency. The first set of studies showed that although foreign-accented speech is more difficult to process, this disfluency does not affect cognitive judgments. In the second set of studies, two experiments show that disfluency in processing affects judgments of truth (Experiment 1) and the intention to purchase a product (Experiment 2) only with written – non-verbal – material. Experiment 3 investigates one possible explanation for the limited influence of processing fluency in speech: because people tend to focus on conceptual information over low-level acoustic information when processing language (Lahiri & Marslen-Wilson, 1991; Gow & Gordon, 1995; Mattys, White & Melhorn, 2005; Norris, McQueen & Cutler, 1995), distortions to the superficial features of the speech signal is likely to have limited impact on how people process the conceptual content. In Experiment 3 participants are primed to attend to the superficial features of foreign-accented speech. The results showed that when people are primed to attend to features that make foreign-accented speech difficult, non-native speech has an impact on subsequent judgments of truth. Overall, the studies presented here show that listeners can extract content from speech, even when it is distorted. They also show that when attention is directed to low-level acoustic features of speech, processing fluency effects becomes apparent. / text

Processing fluency describes the assessment of how easy a stimulus is to cognitively process, an assessment which can be mistakenly applied to judgments of other aspects of the stimulus. This dissertation introduces a novel approach to understanding the development of impressions from online profiles by incorporating the role of processing fluency in interpersonal judgments based on a social networking profile. 195 participants (155 females) were asked to view the "about me" section of a social networking profile, which had been manipulated according to one of three fluency conditions to be harder or easier to process. Participants completed scales assessing liking, similarity, trust, and compatibility, and their disclosure was measured in an open-response item. Confirming expectations based on the processing fluency literature, each of these variables was increased in the high fluency profile condition. No differences in these variables were found between the low fluency conditions and a control condition, and analysis revealed that the manipulations intended to lower fluency may have been too salient to participants. Broadly, this study shows that processing fluency can influence impression formation from online profiles across a number of meaningful relational variables. Enhancing processing ease may allow online interactants a relational "jump-start," increasing liking, perceptions of similarity, trust, compatibility, and disclosure. These findings hold important implications for the role of processing fluency in computer-mediated communication and for models of online relationship development. / text

According to the Body-Specificity Hypothesis, experiences of habitual motor fluency cause people to associate positive valence with their dominant hand side and confer positive valence to items located on their dominant hand side (Casasanto, 2009). Can ongoing motor experience impact this association in the absence of visually lateralized stimuli? In Experiment 1, participants flipped cards using one hand and rated the image on each card with respect to how well it was described by positive or negative personal characteristics. Contrary to our predictions, participant’s ratings were not biased by the hand that they used during the trial. In Experiment 2, the task was almost entirely the same, though participants wore a slippery glove on their dominant hand to reduce the perceived motor fluency of the dominant hand. Again, participant’s ratings were not biased by the relative motor fluency of the hand used during the trial. Results indicate that ongoing motor activity may not be sufficient to activate body specific preferences in the absence of visually lateralized stimuli. / text

According to previous studies, a higher degree of processing fluency leads to higher liking; however, other studies indicate that a higher degree of processing fluency leads to lower recognition. This experiment examines the influence of processing fluency on both liking and recognition to determine if the same results occur when participants are asked to rate liking and remember images. Subjects rated a series of images by level of liking, then were given a recognition test. The stimuli were a combination of fluent and disfluent product images with varied fluency in each of four categories: Amount of Information, Figure-Ground Contrast, Clarity, and Symmetry. Results indicated that participants liked fluent images more than disfluent images. However, results also revealed a trend that recognition may have been higher for fluent images, and that the effects of fluency on recognition depended on which type was manipulated. Thus, the effects of varying processing fluency are different when participants are asked to both rate liking and remember items. This experiment aims to provide successful marketing tactics, suggesting that marketers make their products fluent in order to produce greater liking and memory.

The current research investigates how and why consumers' construal levels and the appeals framed either by gains or losses jointly influence persuasion. The findings across four experiments indicate that matching high-level construals with gain frames and low-level construals with loss frames leads to a) higher intentions to engage in cholesterol lowering behavior (experiment 1), b) more favorable brand attitudes (experiment 2), c) greater willingness to donate to an environmental organization (experiment 3), and d) higher buying intentions for a brand (experiment 4). It seems that these outcomes occur because matches between construal level and message frames encourage people to pay attention to the information they evaluate (experiments 1 ˜4), and this enhanced attention induces greater perceptions of processing fluency, which in turn leads to positive attitudes (experiments 2˜4). Further, this research demonstrates that an adequate amount of cognitive resources is required for this matching effect to occur (experiment 4). The current research contributes to the construal level, message framing, and matching literatures by unveiling the specific mechanism underlying the matching relationship between construal level and gain versus loss frames on persuasion and by identifying a boundary condition for it. This research also has managerial implications for marketing managers and policymakers in that it suggests a strategic way to use construal level and message frames to enhance marketing communication and advertising effectiveness.

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Processing fluency is the notion that cognitive processes and their neural corre-lates can function fluently or disfluently (Reber et al., 2004; Winkielman et al., 2003; Shen et al., 2010; Wänke & Hansen, 2015). Fluent or disfluent processing has been conjectured to give rise to a subjective affective experience that is relied on in a variety of judgement tasks, like: evaluation based on perceptive features (Reber et al., 2004); formation of attitudes (Rubin et al., 2010); judging truth (see. Wänke & Hansen, 2015); evaluation and understanding of written content (Song & Schwartz, 2008; Shen et al., 2010;) and more. The aim of this study was to test the possible implicit effects on evaluative judgement of faces following a task of pairing parent to offspring of varying difficulties (by modulating the degree of similarity). This inquiry was spurred by the hypothesis that fluency pose a pro-cessing dynamic that provide experiential information that is used for aesthetic evaluation. The web-based testing used in this case was designed to test if this effect infuses items with a quality of salience that is limited to specific stimuli (face). Or if it is less defined and generalized to influence all subsequent evalua-tion. The testing group of 93 (M = 41y, SD = 13.16) participants (71 females, 17 males, 5 other), was divided into two groups with different fluency conditions. The results (r(93) = .27, p = .009) indicated that positive evaluations is more likely to follow low-fluency conditions (operationalized as pairing time). A possible ex-planation for this observation is that low-fluency conditions probably engage deeper processing of the stimulus, perhaps contributing to a more durable memory trace which provides better recognition and familiarity of the stimulus at the time of the evaluation. Furthermore, it is more than likely that fluency is sensitive to attribution during task shift, which could negate relevance of previous experience or create a contrast effect (i.e. evaluating the stimulus more favourably due to the negative valence of a previous exposure), leaving “only” the facilitating property of exposure-time to the stimuli salient. Another finding is that females on average evaluate faces more positively then males.

Aesthetic expressions have been seen as the manifest of human culture. The psychology of aesthetics have proposed various models, describing the various phenomena related to aesthetic experience, such as sensory pleasure derived from aesthetic stimuli, emotional response toward aesthetic depiction, cognitive mastering over aesthetic emotion, etc. However, further examination reveals current models have theoretical limits for the explanation of society-wide aesthetic preference due to limited scope of focus. Thus, the current project proposes a new theoretical framework to describe the process through which the society comes to converge on aesthetic preference. Examination of related theories and experimental evidence shows that the convergence process of our aesthetic preference is a function of several inter-related yet independent psychological mechanisms at the perceptual, affective, and cognitive stages of aesthetic processing. The proposed framework can inform future research in general psychology as well as other applications, such as the making of creative machines.Aesthetic expressions have been seen as the manifest of human culture. The psychology of aesthetics have proposed various models, describing the various phenomena related to aesthetic experience, such as sensory pleasure derived from aesthetic stimuli, emotional response toward aesthetic depiction, cognitive mastering over aesthetic emotion, etc. However, further examination reveals current models have theoretical limits for the explanation of society-wide aesthetic preference due to limited scope of focus. Thus, the current project proposes a new theoretical framework to describe the process through which the society comes to converge on aesthetic preference. Examination of related theories and experimental evidence shows that the convergence process of our aesthetic preference is a function of several inter-related yet independent psychological mechanisms at the perceptual, affective, and cognitive stages of aesthetic processing. The proposed framework can inform future research in general psychology as well as other applications, such as the making of creative machines.