Exploring “fringe” consciousness: The subjective experience of perceptual fluency and its objective bases

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Abstract

Perceptual fluency is the subjective experience of ease with which an incoming stimulus is processed. Although perceptual fluency is assessed by speed of processing, it remains unclear how objective speed is related to subjective experiences of fluency. We present evidence that speed at different stages of the perceptual process contributes to perceptual fluency. In an experiment, figure-ground contrast influenced detection of briefly presented words, but not their identification at longer exposure durations. Conversely, font in which the word was written influenced identification, but not detection. Both contrast and font influenced subjective fluency. These findings suggest that speed of processing at different stages condensed into a unified subjective experience of perceptual fluency.

Introduction

If scholars discuss consciousness, they often mean conscious representation of materials that are at the focus of attention. It is consciousness about something. However, some experiences are at the periphery of the stream of consciousness. James (1890) introduced the term “fringe consciousness” to denote vague feelings that provide contextual information about conscious materials that are in the focus of attention (see Cook, 1999; Mangan, 1993; Velmans, 2000, for discussions). This information comes in a highly condensed form. As Baars and McGovern (1996) and Epstein (2000) pointed out, the fringe, as introduced by James, refers to several kinds of feelings. Examples are familiarity; the tip-of-the-tongue state (see Brown, 2000); feelings of knowing (see Koriat, 2000); the sense of being on the right track (see Mangan, 1993).

In this article, we discuss one kind of phenomenal experience at the fringe of consciousness: Perceptual fluency (see Reber, Fazendeiro, & Winkielman, 2002). This is the subjective experience of ease with which a person can process incoming information. Perceptual fluency accompanies every perceptual act and is felt at the periphery of conscious awareness. This feeling is not at the focus of attention unless one assesses it directly. Therefore, it is on the fringe of consciousness most of the time.1 Fluency may or may not be reflected in conscious subjective experience (see Winkielman, Schwarz, Fazendeiro, & Reber, 2003). Thus, we use the term objective fluency to refer to the dimension of speed, resource demands, and accuracy of mental processes. High objective fluency involves high speed, low resource demands, high accuracy, or other indicators of efficient processing, without necessarily assuming that these processes are reflected on a subjective level. On the other hand, we use the term subjective fluency, to refer to a conscious experience of processing ease or difficulty, effort, speed, etc. High subjective fluency is characterized by the feeling of ease of ongoing processing, low effort, or high speed.

Fluency can reflect processes and manipulations occurring at various levels (see Winkielman et al., 2003). Perceptual fluency reflects the ease of low-level processes concerned primarily with stimulus form. Accordingly, perceptual fluency is influenced by variables like repetition, perceptual priming, clarification, presentation duration, or figure-to-ground contrast (see Reber et al., 2002). On the other hand, conceptual fluency reflects the ease of high-level processes concerned primarily with stimulus meaning and its relation to other semantic knowledge structures. Accordingly, conceptual fluency is influenced by variables like semantic priming or semantic predictability, etc. (e.g., Whittlesea, 1993). Research suggests that in many cases the effects of various processing manipulations tend to result in a similar feeling of general “fluency.” In this article, we will focus on origins of perceptual fluency; if we use the term “fluency,” we always mean “perceptual fluency.”

We first provide an overview on research about effects of perceptual fluency in judgmental tasks. We then turn to the assessment of perceptual fluency: Although it is often defined as a phenomenal experience, it is normally measured in terms of objective perceptual speed, which is assumed to reflect the feeling. Are perceptual speed and subjective experience of fluency just two sides of the same coin, as suggested by the assessment of perceptual fluency in psychological research? We show that the relationship between objective and subjective perceptual fluency is more complicated: we present evidence that subjective fluency is a feeling based on objective perceptual fluency at different stages of perceptual processing. Subjective perceptual fluency is a unified experience based on objective fluency from several sources.

Section snippets

Effects of perceptual fluency in judgmental tasks

Several lines of research have demonstrated that people draw on the subjective experience of fluency to make a variety of judgments. Repeated exposure has been shown to have an impact on a multitude of experiences and judgments, such as processing fluency (Whittlesea, Jacoby, & Girard, 1990), perceived duration of stimulus exposure (Witherspoon & Allan, 1985), familiarity (Whittlesea, 1993), fame (Jacoby, Kelley, Brown, & Jasechko, 1989), affect (Bornstein, 1989; Kunst-Wilson & Zajonc, 1980;

Perceptual fluency: Subjective experience and its objective bases

Perceptual fluency was assessed by measures like pronunciation latency (e.g., Whittlesea, 1993; Whittlesea et al., 1990; Whittlesea & Leboe, 2000; Whittlesea and Williams, 1998, Whittlesea and Williams, 2000, Whittlesea and Williams, 2001), likelihood of identification (Jacoby & Dallas, 1981), or naming latency (Reber et al., 1998). All these assessments of perceptual fluency were based on the simple assumption that objective perceptual speed or accuracy underlies the subjective experience of

Objective and subjective fluency: An experiment

We examined how two different dimensions—figure-ground contrast and font of written words—influenced two stages of the perceptual process: Detection and identification. We discussed three possibilities how subjective perceptual fluency may be related to objective perceptual fluency. Let us go through the three possibilities and let us see what our study would predict for each of these possibilities.

(a) If performance in the detection and identification tasks were highly interrelated, we would

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    This research was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (Grant No. 61-57881.99 to Rolf Reber). We thank Josephine Cock, Doris Eckstein, Thedra Fazendeiro, Dörthe Heinemann, Walter Perrig, Mark Price, Bruce Whittlesea, Piotr Winkielman, and an anonymous reviewer for comments on earlier versions of the manuscript.

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