Recent evidence suggests that increased liking of exposed stimuli-a phenomenon known as the mere exposure effect-is dependent on experiencing the stimuli in the same context at exposure and test. Three experiments extended this work by examining the effect of presenting target stimuli in single and multiple exposure contexts. Target face stimuli were repeatedly paired with nonsense words, which...

Previous observational research suggests that stretching is contagious in budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus). Here we report the first experimental evidence of this response through a reanalysis of a previous experiment testing for contagious yawning in this species. Using a repeated measures design, 16 birds were tested as pairs alongside familiar and unfamiliar conspecifics with and withou...

In a previous article, Moore, Rosenberg and Coleman (Brain and Language, 2005, 94, 72-85) reported evidence for significant improvements in phonological awareness in mainstream children following 6 h of exposure to a commercially available phoneme discrimination training programme, but not in a control group. In a follow-up study, we failed to replicate this finding, despite using an almost ide...

BACKGROUND Non-medical professionals (consumers) are increasingly using the Internet to support their health information needs. However, the cognitive effort required to perform health information searches is affected by the consumer's familiarity with health topics. Consumers may have different levels of familiarity with individual health topics. This variation in familiarity may cause misunde...

Researchers have attempted to model information diffusion and topic trends and lifecycle on online social networks. They have investigated the role of content, social connections and communities, familiarity and behavioral similarity in this context. The current article presents a survey of representative models that perform topic analysis, capture information diffusion, and explore the propert...

A growing body of research aims to identify the factors that motivate people to make contributions in Wikipedia. We conducted two laboratory experiments to investigate the connections between topic characteristics, perception of threat, and willingness to engage with Wikipedia articles. In Study 1 (N = 83), we examined how topic familiarity, topic controversiality, and mortality salience influe...

BACKGROUND Two experiments investigated the effect of features of human behaviour on the quality of interaction with an Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA). METHODS In Experiment 1, visual prominence cues (head nod, eyebrow raise) of the ECA were manipulated to explore the hypothesis that likeability of an ECA increases as a function of interpersonal mimicry. In the context of an error detect...

We investigated the contribution of familiarity and recollection to associative retrieval of word pairs depending on the extent to which the pairs have been unitized through task instructions in the encoding phase. Participants in the unitization condition encoded word pairs in the context of a definition that tied them together such that they were treated as a coherent new item, while in the c...

Using survey data, we examine public attitudes toward and awareness of nanotechnology in Germany (N = 750). First, it is shown that a majority of the people are still not familiar with nanotechnology. In addition, diffusion of information about nanotechnology thus far mostly seems to reach men and people with a relative higher educational background. Also, pro-science and technology views are p...

Four experiments examined contributions of conceptual relatedness and feelings of familiarity to false recognition. Participants first studied lists of unrelated items (e.g., table, lock) followed by a recognition test with three types of items: (1) studied items (e.g., table), (2) semantically related lures (e.g., key), and (3) unrelated lures (e.g., cup). Participants falsely recognized more ...