With Defne Dere we won the Applied Vision Association (AVA) scholarship this year! The Scholarship provides a stipend (£200 per week, subsistence, for up to 8 weeks) to support undergraduates to carry out a self-contained vision-related research project, in the laboratory of an AVA member. The scheme allows the student to experience a real research environment and to be trained to carry out a piece of scientific research, with the aim of encouraging them to consider an academic research career.
Project Title: Individual visual sensitivity moderates perceptual fluency effects on evaluative judgment.
Summary: Perceptual fluency refers to the subjective ease with which a stimulus is processed (Reber, Schwarz, & Winkielman, 2004). Stimuli that are easier to perceive, due to factors such as higher contrast, clearer fonts, symmetry, longer exposure, or repetition, are often judged more positively, remembered better, and believed more. Perceptual fluency has been shown to influence aesthetic preferences (i.e., liking), truth judgments, confidence, memory, and decision-making.
Much research on perceptual fluency assumes that fluency manipulations operate similarly across individuals. However, people differ substantially in their visual processing abilities. These differences include variation in visual acuity, contrast sensitivity, susceptibility to visual discomfort, and sensitivity to visually stressful patterns such as those that induce pattern glare. Individuals also vary in broader sensory sensitivity and visual processing speed. Such individual differences are likely to influence both the objective perceptibility of visual stimuli and the subjective experience of perceptual fluency.
The proposed project will examine whether perceptual fluency influences judgments differently depending on individual differences in visual ability and sensitivity. Although perceptual fluency has been shown to affect a wide range of cognitive and evaluative judgments, most research has implicitly assumed that these effects operate similarly across observers. This project will test the possibility that the strength of perceptual fluency effects is moderated by individual differences in visual processing.
Specifically, it is hypothesised that perceptual fluency will interact with individual visual abilities such that the impact of fluency on judgments varies as a function of visual sensitivity. One possibility is that individuals with poorer visual acuity, lower contrast sensitivity, or higher levels of visual discomfort will show stronger perceptual fluency effects, as differences in perceptual clarity may be more salient when visual processing is more effortful. Alternatively, individuals with stronger visual abilities may show greater sensitivity to subtle perceptual differences, potentially amplifying fluency-based effects. It is also possible that individuals with more efficient visual processing rely less on fluency as a heuristic, resulting in weaker effects.
To address this question, perceptual fluency will be manipulated using differences in visual contrast. Participants will view a series of stimuli (e.g., words or simple images) presented in either high or low contrast. Following each stimulus, participants will make evaluative judgments such as how much they like the stimulus, how aesthetically pleasing it appears, or how confident they are in their perception. This will allow us to assess the influence of perceptual fluency on evaluative responses.
Participants will also complete measures assessing individual differences in visual ability and sensitivity. These will include objective tasks measuring contrast sensitivity, as well as questionnaires assessing visual discomfort or sensitivity to visually stressful patterns. The key aim is to determine whether the magnitude of the perceptual fluency effect, i.e., the difference in judgments between high- and low-fluency stimuli, varies as a function of individual visual sensitivity. This design will provide a direct test of whether individual differences in visual processing moderate the cognitive and evaluative effects of perceptual fluency.