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Effects of familiarity on the construction of psychological distance  

Bae, Heekyung (Yonsei University, Department of Psychology)
Kim, Kyungmi (Yale University, Department of Psychology)
Yi, Do-Joon (Yonsei University, Department of Psychology)
Publication Information
Korean Journal of Cognitive Science / v.25, no.2, 2014 , pp. 109-133 More about this Journal
Abstract
Psychological distance refers to the perceived gap between a stimulus and a person's direct experience and its activation influences the decisions and actions that the person makes towards the stimulus. We investigated whether the level of familiarity affects the construction of psychological distance. Specifically, we hypothesized that a familiar stimulus, relative to an unfamiliar stimulus, is perceived to be psychologically closer to the observer and so its perception might be modulated by the perceived spatial distance. The familiarity of stimuli was manipulated in terms of preexposure frequency and preexposure perceptual fluency. In experiments, participants were first exposed with three nonsense words in a lexical decision task. The nonsense words were presented in nonword trials with different levels of frequency (frequent vs. rare, Experiment 1) or with different levels of visibility (less blurred vs. more blurred, Experiment 2). Participants then performed a distance Stroop task with the most familiar and the least familiar nonwords. Each of them appeared in either proximal or distant spatial locations in scenes with clear depth cues. The results showed a significant interaction between the word familiarity and the spatial distance: the familiar word was judged faster in proximal locations but slower in distant locations relative to the unfamiliar word. The current findings suggest that metacognitive evaluation of familiarity could be one of the critical factors that underlie the construction of psychological distance.
Keywords
familiarity; psychological distance; fluency; metacognition; construal level theory;
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