The source of feelings of familiarity: The discrepancy-attribution hypothesis

Many investigators have observed that the feeling of familiarity is associa ted with fluency of processing. The authors demonstrated a case in which th e feeling of familiarity did not result from fluency per se; they argued th at it resulted instead from perceiving a discrepancy between the actual and expected fluency of processing (B. W. A. Whittlesea & L. D. Williams, 1998 ). In this article, the authors extend that argument. They observed that st imuli that are experienced as strongly familiar when presented in isolation are instead experienced as being novel when presented in a rhyme or semant ic context. They interpreted that result to mean that in those other contex ts, the subjects brought a different standard to bear in evaluating the flu ency of their processing. This different standard caused the subjects to pe rceive their performance not as discrepant, but as coherent in one case and incongruous in the other. The authors suggest that the perception of discr epancy is a major factor in producing the feeling of familiarity. They furt her suggest that the occurrence of that perception depends on the task in w hich the person is engaged when encountering the stimulus, because that tas k affects the standard that the person will apply in evaluating their proce ssing.