Mere Exposure Effects on Implicit Stimulus Evaluation: The Moderating Role of Evaluation Task, Number of Stimulus Presentations, and Memory for Presentation Frequency

Abstract

The mere exposure (ME) effect refers to the well-established finding that people evaluate a stimulus more positively after repeated exposure to it. So far, the vast majority of studies on ME effects have examined changes in explicit stimulus evaluation. We describe the results of three large-scale studies (combined N = 3,623) that examined ME effects on implicit stimulus evaluation. We looked at three moderators of these effects: the implicit evaluation measure, the number of stimulus presentations, and memory for presentation frequency. We observed ME effects on implicit stimulus evaluations as measured with an Implicit Association Test (IAT) and Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP), but not an Evaluative Priming Task (EPT). ME effects were more robust when there were relatively few stimulus presentations and when participants had accurate memory for the presentation frequencies. We discuss how these findings relate to ME effects on explicit evaluations as well as theoretical and practical implications.