In 1995, Malach et al. discovered an area whose fMRI BOLD response was greater when viewing intact, familiar objects than when viewing their scrambled versions (resembling texture). Since then hundreds of studies have explored this late visual region termed the Lateral Occipital Complex (LOC), which is now known to be critical for shape perception (James, Culham, Humphrey, Milner, & Goodale, 20...

This study examines the effects of working memory capacity and content familiarity on literal and inferential comprehension in second language (L2) reading. Participants were 62 Turkish university students with an advanced English proficiency level. Working memory capacity was measured through a computerized version of a reading span test, whereas content familiarity was achieved through nativi...

How do people decide whether to try to retrieve an answer to a problem or to compute the answer by some other means? The authors report 2 experiments showing that this decision is based on problem familiarity rather than on retrievability of some answer (correct or incorrect), even when problem familiarization occurred 24 hr earlier. These effects at the level of the individual problem solver a...

The current study investigated the effect of familiarity with the voice and face of a talker on a subsequent speech intelligibility task. Participants were first familiarized with four animated characters that they learned to identify by voice, by face and by both face and voice. Ceiling level performance was reached. Following this training, participants were given a speech in noise identifica...

BACKGROUND Accessing information that defines personally familiar context in real-world situations is essential for the social interactions and the independent functioning of an individual. Personal familiarity is associated with the availability of semantic and episodic information as well as the emotional meaningfulness surrounding a stimulus. These features are known to be associated with ne...

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to investigate impact of knowledge, familiarity, and prejudice about mental illness as well as demographic factors on the social distance from mentally ill people, which is a proxy measure of discrimination. METHOD To assess the impact of knowledge and familiarity, prejudice about mental illness and demographic factors on the social distance from mental...

The paired-associate task has been used with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in studies that assessed the role of the medial temporal lobe (MTL) subserving recollection and familiarity.Some researchers have interpreted their results to mean that the hippocampus selectively subserves recollection and not familiarity[cf., Eichenbaum et al., (2007) Annu Rev Neurosci 30:123–152]. Yet m...

We present an exploration of familiarity as a meaningful dimension for the individualized adaptation of media-rich interfaces. In this paper, we investigate in particular the effect of digital images personalized for familiarity on users’ perceived interestingness. Two dimensions of familiarity, facial familiarity and familiarity with image context, are manipulated. Our investigation consisted ...