Department of General Psychology and Methodology, University of Bamberg, Bamberg, Germany.
PLoS One. 2012;7(2):e31215. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0031215. Epub 2012 Feb 8.
Zajonc showed that the attitude towards stimuli that one had been previously exposed to is more positive than towards novel stimuli. This mere exposure effect (MEE) has been tested extensively using various visual stimuli. Research on the MEE is sparse, however, for other sensory modalities.
METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: We used objects of two material categories (stone and wood) and two complexity levels (simple and complex) to test the influence of exposure frequency (F0 = novel stimuli, F2 = stimuli exposed twice, F10 = stimuli exposed ten times) under two sensory modalities (haptics only and haptics & vision). Effects of exposure frequency were found for high complex stimuli with significantly increasing liking from F0 to F2 and F10, but only for the stone category. Analysis of "Need for Touch" data showed the MEE in participants with high need for touch, which suggests different sensitivity or saturation levels of MEE.
CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: This different sensitivity or saturation levels might also reflect the effects of expertise on the haptic evaluation of objects. It seems that haptic and cross-modal MEEs are influenced by factors similar to those in the visual domain indicating a common cognitive basis.
Zajonc 表明，人们对先前接触过的刺激的态度比对新刺激的态度更为积极。这种单纯曝光效应（MEE）已经通过各种视觉刺激进行了广泛的测试。然而，对于其他感觉模态，关于 MEE 的研究却很少。
方法/主要发现：我们使用了两种材料类别（石头和木材）和两种复杂程度（简单和复杂）的物体来测试在两种感觉模态下（仅触觉和触觉和视觉）曝光频率（F0=新刺激，F2=暴露两次的刺激，F10=暴露十次的刺激）的影响。对于高复杂度的刺激，我们发现曝光频率的影响显著，从 F0 到 F2 和 F10，喜欢程度显著增加，但仅限于石头类别。对“触摸需求”数据的分析表明，在触摸需求较高的参与者中存在 MEE，这表明 MEE 的敏感性或饱和度水平不同。
结论/意义：这种不同的敏感性或饱和度水平也可能反映了触觉对物体评估的专业知识的影响。触觉和跨模态 MEE 似乎受到与视觉领域相似的因素的影响，这表明存在共同的认知基础。
