Familiarity and attraction to stimuli: Developmental change or methodological artifact?

Abstract

One hundred thirteen 7-, 9-, and 11-year-old children viewed a series of stimuli consisting of Chinese characters exposed a different number of times. Following exposure to the stimuli, children ranked the stimuli according to liking. Seven- and 9-year-olds preferred the more familiar characters to those seen less frequently, but the oldest children preferred novel stimuli. In rankings taken 3 weeks after original exposure, a subsample of 11-year-olds preferred the more familiar characters. These results suggest that discrepancies obtained in previous research on the affective consequences of mere exposure are of methodological rather than developmental origin. Possible critical differences in procedure are discussed.