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Assessing food neophobia: the role of stimulus familiarity.

The present study assesses the effects of food familiarity on food ratings of neophobics and neophilics by having them sample and evaluate familiar and novel foods. Level of neophobia was assessed using the Food Neophobia Scale (FNS). Participants rated their familiarity with each food, their willingness to try the foods and expected liking for the foods, as well as their actual liking for the foods after they were sampled. Willingness to try the foods again in the future, and the amount of food sampled were also assessed. Evaluations of the foods were more positive for familiar vs. unfamiliar foods across all study participants. The responses of neophobics and neophilics were similar for familiar foods, but differed when the foods were unfamiliar, with neophobics making more negative evaluations. Neophobics and neophilics differed least in their liking ratings of the stimuli that were made after the foods were actually sampled, and differed most in their ratings of willingness to try the foods. It is concluded that neophobics have different expectancies about unfamiliar foods, and that these expectancies influence food sampling and rating behaviors. The neophobic's negative attitude toward an unfamiliar food may be ameliorated, but is not eliminated, once sensory information about the food is obtained.

Adolescent↗

State-dependent effects of alcohol on recollective experience, familiarity and awareness of memories.

RATIONALE: Explicit memory (EM) is the memory for events which occurs with full awareness of where and how the recalled events took place, whereas implicit memory (IM) is the memory which is unfolded without any awareness of these events and usually becomes apparent when performance is facilitated by its presence. These two types of memory can be understood as different systems. Findings attempting to differentiate between the two systems in normal subjects have been controversial, with some researchers arguing that there is a single memory system and only the match in processes used during learning and later at retrieval can be important. OBJECTIVES: The present study compared the effects of alcohol (0.8 g/kg) or placebo administered prior to encoding and/or retrieval on measures of explicit and implicit memory in terms of recollective experience and familiarity. METHODS: At encoding subjects studied a list of 80 words presented in pairs. At retrieval, participants first carried out an implicit stem completion task, followed by an explicitly cued recall task (stem completion) which measured IM and EM respectively. After stem completion participants were required to indicate whether the items from the studied list were consciously recollected ("remember" response) or was known for a fact that were presented in the studied list ("know" response). In the IM task completed items from the studied list but not recognised by the subjects as such indicated memory without awareness. Studied items were of high and low associations. Forty-eight participants were tested in one of four drug conditions: alcohol-alcohol, placebo-placebo, placebo-alcohol, alcohol-placebo. RESULTS: In the implicit stem completion task, alcohol did not affect overall correct completion rates. However, participants who received alcohol prior to encoding reported lower awareness of correctly completed study items. In the cued recall task, alcohol also did not affect overall performance. However, participants in the same drug-state conditions (SS) reported greater recollection than familiarity with study material, whereas participants who encoded and retrieved material in different drug-state conditions (DS) reported recollection and familiarity to the same extent. In addition, DS participants showed more familiarity with study material compared to SS participants. Direct comparisons between IM and EM tasks demonstrated that alcohol at retrieval decreased the cued recall of items from high associations compared to placebo, but did not have any effect on implicit stem completion. CONCLUSIONS: In summary, these results demonstrate a dissociation of alcohol effects on measures of EM and IM. Alcohol administered prior to encoding reduced awareness of implicitly retrieved material, but did not impair IM per se, confirming previous findings with alcohol. In addition, the data provided new evidence for state-dependent retrieval effects on EM but not IM. It was also shown that for explicitly retrieved items, recollective experience benefits from same drug state, whereas familiarity benefits from different drug state between encoding and retrieval.

Adolescent↗

Recollective experience in odor recognition: influences of adult age and familiarity.

We examined recollective experience in odor memory as a function of age, intention to learn, and familiarity. Young and older adults studied a set of familiar and unfamiliar odors with incidental or intentional encoding instructions. At recognition, participants indicated whether their response was based on explicit recollection (remembering), a feeling of familiarity (knowing), or guessing. The results indicated no age-related differences in the distribution of experiential responses for unfamiliar odors. By contrast, for familiar odors the young demonstrated more explicit recollection than the older adults, who produced more "know" and "guess" responses. Intention to learn was unrelated to recollective experience. In addition, the observed age differences in "remember" responses for familiar odors were eliminated when odor naming was statistically controlled. This suggests that age-related deficits in activating specific odor knowledge (i.e., odor names) play an important role for age differences in recollective experience of olfactory information.

Adolescent↗

Female familiarity influences odor preferences and plasma estradiol levels in the meadow vole, Microtus pennsylvanicus.

To determine whether neighbor familiarity can affect reproduction, we studied the relationship between familiarity, odor preference, and plasma estradiol levels in the meadow vole, Microtus pennsylvanicus. Bedding was switched between pairs of female meadow voles for 2 wk to allow them to develop olfactory familiarity. When familiarization was complete animals were reexposed, after 24 h of no exposure to conspecific odors, to either the bedding of the familiar female or to the bedding of a new, unfamiliar female. Voles exposed to the bedding of unfamiliar females experienced a dramatic reversal in odor preference and failed to orient towards male odors. This behavioral change was accompanied by a significant decrease in plasma estradiol levels. These changes suggest that exposure to unfamiliar conspecifics may result in reproductive inhibition. Excessive contact between unfamiliar females in the field may be indicative of environmental conditions unfavorable to breeding.

Animals↗

Play it again: did this melody occur more frequently or was it heard more recently? The role of stimulus familiarity in episodic recognition of music.

Episodic recognition of novel and familiar melodies was examined by asking participants to make judgments about the recency and frequency of presentation of melodies over the course of two days of testing. For novel melodies, recency judgments were poor and participants often confused the number of presentations of a melody with its day of presentation; melodies heard frequently were judged as have been heard more recently than they actually were. For familiar melodies, recency judgments were much more accurate and the number of presentations of a melody helped rather than hindered performance. Frequency judgments were generally more accurate than recency judgments and did not demonstrate the same interaction with musical familiarity. Overall, these findings suggest that (1) episodic recognition of novel melodies is based more on a generalized "feeling of familiarity" than on a specific episodic memory, (2) frequency information contributes more strongly to this generalized memory than recency information, and (3) the formation of an episodic memory for a melody depends either on the overall familiarity of the stimulus or the availability of a verbal label.

Adolescent↗

Configural and analytical processing of familiar and unfamiliar objects.

Configural processing could develop for non-face visual objects as one becomes familiar with those objects through repeated exposure. To explore the role of familiarity in object recognition, we studied the effect of adaptation to a visual object (adapting stimulus) on the identification performance of other objects (test stimulus) while adapting and test stimuli were exactly the same, shared parts or were completely different. We used a subset of English alphabets (p, q, d and b) as familiar objects and an unfamiliar set of symbols constructed from same parts but with different configurations. Adaptation to a member of each set led to a lower identification performance for that object in a crowding paradigm. Adaptation to each member of the unfamiliar set resulted in decreased identification performance for the same object and those members of the set that shared parts with the adapting stimulus. But no such transfer of adaptation was observed for the familiar set. Our results support the notion that processing of object parts plays an important role in the recognition of unfamiliar objects while recognition of familiar objects is mainly based on configural processing mechanisms.

Adaptation, Psychological↗

Recollection and familiarity in negative schizophrenia.

Using the "remember-know" procedure to assess recognition memory, previous studies yielded evidence of impaired recollection but intact familiarity in schizophrenia patients. However, so far, the recognition memory performance of schizophrenia patients has not yet been analysed using the dual-process signal detection model (DPSD) by Yonelinas [Yonelinas, A. P. (2001). Components of episodic memory: The contribution of recollection and familiarity. Philosophical Transactions of Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences, 356(1413), 1363-1374], which accurately accounts for response and memory bias. Also, clinical symptoms have not yet been taken into account. Based on findings from neuropsychological and neurobiological research we hypothesized that high negative symptoms might be associated with a profile of impaired recollection and spared familiarity. The recognition memory performance of 22 schizophrenia patients scoring higher or lower on the negative symptoms subscale of the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS) was assessed by means of a word list discrimination task. Following the rationale of the dual-process signal detection model, estimates of recollection and familiarity were derived. The recollection estimate, derived by the DPSD model, was lower in patients with more severe negative symptomatology compared with both the patients with lower negative symptoms scores and healthy individuals. Familiarity was not affected if IQ was partialled out. Furthermore, the results yielded increased false alarm rates in patients with negative schizophrenia. The findings confirm an association of negative symptoms and recollection impairment in schizophrenia.

Adult↗

Eye movements and familiarity effects in visual search.

Familiarity with the distractors around an unfamiliar target facilitates visual search. Three Experiments examined whether the effect occurs because fixations are (a) shorter and fewer, (b) shorter, but more abundant, (c) equally long, but fewer, or (d) longer, but fewer when distractors are familiar. Results indicated comparably long, but fewer fixations when distractors are familiar. Hence, the theory that unfamiliar distractors need longer processing is discounted. In a fourth Experiment, a gaze-contingent moving window paradigm was used to control peripheral processing. Results revealed a wider span of effective processing for familiar distractors. A hypothesis based on low-level physiological processes is introduced to account for the familiarity effect.

Adolescent↗

The role of familiarity in the recognition of static and dynamic objects.

Although the perception of our world is experienced as effortless, the processes that underlie object recognition in the brain are often difficult to determine. In this chapter, we review the effects of familiarity on the recognition of moving or static objects. In particular, we concentrate on exemplar-level stimuli such as walking humans, unfamiliar objects and faces. We found that the perception of these objects can be affected by their familiarity; for example the learned view of an object or the learned dynamic pattern can influence object perception. Deviations in the viewpoint from the familiar viewpoint, or changes in the temporal pattern of the objects can result in some reduction of efficiency in the perception of the object. Furthermore, more efficient sex categorization and crossmodal matching were found for familiar than for unfamiliar faces. In sum, we find that our perceptual system is organized around familiar events and that perception is most efficient with these learned events.

Discrimination, Psychological↗

Discrimination by olfactory cues in albino rats reflecting familiarity and relatedness among conspecifics.

The present investigation sought to determine whether albino rat pups could discriminate among familiar siblings, nonfamiliar siblings, familiar nonsiblings (foster littermates), and nonfamiliar nonsiblings (unrelated agemates) using only olfactory cues. Pairing all possible combinations of familiarity and kinship variables (six), the odors were presented in paired combinations to each of twelve experimental subjects. Results from dependent t tests indicated that the albino rat pups could discriminate between the following pairs of odors using only the olfactory sensory modality: (a) familial siblings and nonfamiliar siblings, (t = 3.41, p = .006); (b) familiar siblings and nonfamiliar nonsiblings, (t = 9.62, p = .001); (c) nonfamiliar siblings and nonfamiliar nonsiblings, (t = 3.15, p = .009); and (d) familiar nonsiblings and nonfamiliar nonsiblings (t = 2.58, p = .026).

Animals↗

The familiarity effect for single-letter pairs.

A familiarity effect in these experiments is defined as a subject's ability to respond more rapidly to a familiar stimulus than to an unfamiliar stimulus. In the first experiment, responding faster to familiar letters (upright) than to unfamiliar letters (inverted) occurred only when the two stimulus types were presented in a random order. These results were interpreted in terms of the effects of processing strategy changes. The second experiment compared the responding of Japanese and American subjects to Japanese and English letters. American subjects responded faster to English letters and Japanese subjects responded faster to Japanese letters. This familiarity effect was obtained even when stimulus presentation was organized by letter type and subjects knew which letter type to expect. The final experiment compared English and Japanese letters in a memory search task. The rate of search for Japanese letters was slower than for English letters. However, no zero-intercept difference was obtained. The evidence indicates that familiarity does not affect an initial encoding process, but it can affect a comparison process.

Discrimination, Psychological↗

Effect of familiarity of Multielement matching.

The effect of stimulus familiarity on physical matching was examined in three experiments. In Experiment 1, subjects matched English and Armenian letters. String length varied from one to three items. Familiarity had no effect when two single items were compared, but it had increasingly marked effects with two- and three-item strings. The pattern of same/different responses and serial position effects implicated the comparison process for three-item matches. Experiment 2 varied stimulus onset asynchrony to assess the contribution of familiarity to speeding up encoding and/or to maintaining a representation in memory; only two-item strings were used. Encoding Armenian letters required more time than encoding English, but there was no additional decrement due to holding the representation in memory. In Experiment 3, one group of subject learned names for the Armenian letters and another group practiced drawing the letters. The availability of names did not decrease the familiarity effect. These data suggest that familiarity invariably has a strong effect on the encoding process and influences comparison processes when task requirements are sufficiently demanding.

Adult↗

Word familiarity and frequency in visual and auditory word recognition.

Four experiments investigate printed word frequency and subjective rated familiarity. Words of varied printed frequency and subjective familiarity were presented. A reaction time advantage for high-familiarity and high-frequency words was found in visual (Experiment 1) and auditory (Experiment 2) lexical decision. In Experiments 3 and 4, a cued naming task elicited a naming response after a specified delay after presentation. In Experiment 3, naming of visual words showed a frequency effect with no naming delay. The frequency effect diminished at longer delay intervals. Naming times for auditorily presented words (Experiment 4) showed no frequency effect at any delay. Both naming experiments showed familiarity effects. The relevance of these results are discussed in terms of the role of printed frequency for theories of lexical access, task- and modality-specific effects, and the nature of subjective familiarity.

Adult↗

The cue-familiarity heuristic in metacognition.

Four experiments contrasted the cue-familiarity hypothesis of feeling-of-knowing judgments (FKJs) and tip-of-the-tongue feelings (TOTs) to the target-retrievability hypothesis. Familiarity of the cues was contrasted to memorability of the targets in a paired-associate design (e.g., A-B A-B, A-B A-B', A-B A-D, A-B C-D), in which the number of repetitions of the cue A terms was dissociated from the memorability of the target B terms. Little support was found for the target-retrievability hypothesis, because in none of the 4 experiments were FKJs related to target memorability. In one experiment, an omnibus retrieval hypothesis (which implicates total retrieval rather than just correct retrieval) and the cue-familiarity hypothesis produced isomorphic predictions that were borne out by the FKJ and TOT results. All 4 experiments supported the cue-familiarity hypothesis, because FKJs and TOTs were directly related to the number of presentations (and thereby the familiarity) of the cues.

Adult↗

Two loci of repetition priming in the recognition of familiar faces.

Four experiments examining the repetition priming of familiar face recognition are reported. The experiments showed that the speed of deciding whether a face is familiar was facilitated by prior presentation of the face, but not by reading the written name or by producing the name in response to a definition. In contrast, reading names and producing names to definitions both primed subsequent naming of the corresponding faces (Experiments 1 and 2). Face naming was primed more by face naming than by either familiarity decisions or naming from description (Experiments 3 and 4). The authors propose that repetition priming of familiar face recognition occurs at 2 distinct loci. The first involves the perceptual recognition of a face as familiar and is domain-specific. The second involves name retrieval and is susceptible to both within- and cross-domain priming.

Adult↗

Familiarity and the rarity of deception: two theories and their relevance to play between dogs (Canis familiaris) and humans (Homo sapiens).

One theory of the relation between familiarity and the frequency of deception predicts that familiarity leads to the rarity of deception and another, that familiarity increases deception. We examined which theory applied to play by comparing familiar and unfamiliar partners during play between dogs (Canis familiaris) and humans (Homo sapiens). Deceptions by humans were based on directionality of movement and petting the dog and on the projects show object and throw object, which are specialized for play. Likewise, deceptions by dogs were based on directionality of movement and the project retrieve object (an analogue to show object). Deceptions based on directionality and petting were rare among familiars (and unfamiliars), whereas those based on show object, throw object, and retrieve object were more frequent. The findings suggest that, in play at least, deception may occur frequently.

Adolescent↗

Effects of Alzheimer's disease on the recognition of novel versus familiar words: neuropsychological and clinico-metabolic data.

This study explored recognition memory performance for novel versus familiar words in Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients and normal controls (NCs), using an adaptation of E. Tulving and N. Kroll's (1995) procedure. Results showed that both groups exhibited more hits and more false alarms for familiar than for novel words. The groups did not differ in the recognition of familiar words, reflecting preserved familiarity processes in AD. However, AD patients made more false alarms than NCs in the recognition of novel words, reflecting impairment of recollection processes in AD. A positron emission tomography analysis of clinico-metabolic correlations in AD patients showed a correlation between recognition of novel words and right hippocampal activity, whereas recognition of familiar words was more related to metabolic activity in the left posterior orbitofrontal cortex.

Aged↗

Absence of differential associative responses to novel and familiar taste stimuli in rats lacking gustatory neocortex.

Rats lacking gustatory neocortex (n = 24) and normal rats (n = 24) were familiarized to either hydrochloric acid (10(-1.6) M) or quinine hydrochloride (10(-4) M) solutions during free-drinking trials. They were trained subsequently to avoid either the familiar or the novel taste stimulus, using a balanced design, by pairing the to-be-associated taste with ip injections of apomorphine hydrochloride. Balanced, nonpaired presentations of the other taste solution and water were presented also. Normal rats more efficiently learned to avoid the novel compared with the familiar taste. Rats with gustatory neocortex lesions did not differentiate novel from familiar tastes. They learned aversions to both in a manner highly similar to the aversion learning of familiar tastes by the normal group. Therefore, rats lacking gustatory neocortex displayed an associative deficiency, relative to normal, only when they were trained on novel stimuli. This observation supports an earlier suggestion that gustatory neocortex lesions disrupt the conditionability of taste stimuli by reducing or eliminating responses to taste novelty. This suggestion is supported further by the absence of a "neophobic" response in the operated rats to the first presentation of a taste stimulus.

Animals↗