Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The mere exposure effect, in which subjects prefer items they have previously been exposed to over unexposed items, is explained as the effect of competitive learning in a connectionist network. This type of unsupervised learning will cause the network to respond more strongly to patterns on which it has been trained. If it is assumed that positive affect is proportional to total activation, then the mere exposure effect is a direct consequence of this process. The addition of a habituation rule, with a dishabituating recovery element, can also explain factors which reduce or enhance the effect. These include the effect of exposure count, display presentation sequence, the complexity of the patterns, the effect of a delay after presentation, and finally, the effects of varying exposure duration. In the case of this last factor, in addition to showing that very short exposure durations can enhance the effect, the model reveals why it may be possible to respond positively to a stimulus that one cannot recall perceiving.