Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Understanding how perceptual judgements develop requires methods that capture both existing biases and their susceptibility to short-term experience. We present an online game-based paradigm designed to investigate how affective responses to sounds can be shaped by exposure. 48 participants first completed an affective priming task to establish baseline associations. They then played a simple game in which specific sounds were systematically paired with positive or negative in-game events, providing a controlled but engaging learning environment. A second priming task assessed post-exposure changes. Initial findings indicate that explicit self-reports show consistent shifts in valence judgements aligned with the in-game contingencies, whereas the results on priming are weaker and reach significance only partially. Improvements to the design and implementation are discussed. Overall, the results suggest that the paradigm can capture the experience-dependent modulation of affective perception of sounds while also highlighting the distinction between explicit and implicit measures. The approach offers a general framework for studying short-term plasticity in perceptual cognition.