Assessing Fluency Attributions in an Online Experiment Testing a Community Sample

Abstract

One way to create familiarity experiences in the laboratory is to increase the fluency, or ease of stimulus processing. The idea is that through experience we learn fluent processing is a marker of previous exposure. The Discrepancy-Attribution Hypothesis and Preservation of Experience (SCAPE) framework explain that fluency must be attributed to the past in order to produce familiarity. Studies showed the malleability of the fluency effect by reversing the traditional fluency effect. The reverse fluency effect states that if fluency of a stimuli is manipulated to predict novelty, then more fluency stimuli on a recognition test would be identified as new. The present investigation was designed to replicate the Olds and Westerman priming experiment with a more diverse sample of participants. The study aims to replicate the reversed fluency effect and to determine if the effect generalize to stimuli other than names. Tatool, an online open-source experiment software (www.tatool-web.com), and Javascript programing language were used to host an online research study. Programs in Python were used to combine datafiles. Extensive skills were learned and practiced while navigating this new software for online research.