| Abstract: | The aim of the work presented here is to investigate the effects of mere-exposure to familiar and unfamiliar stimuli (as primes) on credibility judgement about sentences unrelated to the primes. These target sentences are presented just after the prime. In all, 124 students participated in 3 priming experiments. The nature of the primes (both infraliminary and supraliminary) is different in each experiment: we used public vs. unknown faces, exposed vs. unexposed faces, and objects vs. nonobjects. Primes were presented for 50msec or 400msec. After the presentation of each prime, subjects had to judge the credibility of an assertion; its ambiguity has previously been tested with 100 subjects. The results show that assertions which follow familiar primes (public faces, exposed faces, or objects) are granted more credibility that those which follow unfamiliar primes (unknown faces or nonobjects). This effect is observed especially when presentation time is 50msec. |
