Detecting Valence From Unidentifed Images: A Link Between Familiarity And Positivity in Recognition Without Identifcation Part 1

Abstract

Research using the Recognition Without Identification paradigm (Cleary & Greene, 2000, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 26[4], 1063–1069; Peynircioǧlu, 1990, Journal of Memory and Language, 29, 493–500) has found that participants can discriminate between old and new stimuli even when the stimuli are obscured to a degree that they are unidentifiable. 

Recognition paradigms are the mental models or thinking templates people use when processing information. These templates contain people's concepts, cognitions, behaviors, etc., allowing us to process and understand complex information more efficiently. Memory is an indispensable ability for people to learn, think, and accumulate experience in life. The relationship between these two aspects is inseparable.

First, recognition paradigms help improve memory. For example, when we learn new knowledge, if we can combine it with the knowledge and experience we have already mastered to form a more complete cognitive framework, then we can better remember it. Because this new cognitive framework not only provides richer information but also can connect with existing knowledge, making new knowledge easier to remember and understand.

On the other hand, stronger memory can also help us better construct and apply recognition paradigms. For example, when we move to a new city or learn a new skill, if we can quickly remember and master relevant information and organize it into a pattern, we will be able to adapt to the new environment more efficiently. and learning process. This memory ability plays an important role in many aspects of our daily lives, including learning, work, social interaction, and entertainment.

In summary, the recognition paradigm and memory are two interdependent aspects that promote and enhance each other. Improving recognition paradigms can also strengthen memory, and improving memory can help us better apply and construct recognition paradigms. Therefore, as modern people, we should focus on developing and improving our recognition paradigms and memory to live more efficiently and happily. It can be seen that we need to improve our memory. Cistanche deserticola can significantly improve memory because Cistanche deserticola is a traditional Chinese medicinal material with many unique effects, one of which is to improve memory. The efficacy of minced meat comes from the many active ingredients it contains, including acid, polysaccharides, flavonoids, etc. These ingredients can promote brain health in a variety of ways.

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This methodology has been adopted in the past by using heavily obscured threatening and nonthreatening images and asking participants to try to identify each image followed by a familiarity rating of the image. Past results showed that threatening images that were not able to be identified were rated as more familiar than nonthreatening images that were not able to be identified (Cleary et al., 2013, Memory & Cognition, 41, 989–999). 

The current study used a similar methodology to explore the possibility that a sense of familiarity can serve to guide our attention toward potential threats in the environment. However, contrary to earlier results, we found that positive images were rated as more familiar than negative images. This pattern was found with both identifed and unidentifed images and was replicated across five experiments. The current findings are consistent with the view that feelings of positivity and familiarity are closely linked (e.g., de Vries et al., 2010, Psychological Science, 21[3], 321–328; Garcia-Marques et al., 2004, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 30, 585–593; Monin, 2003, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85[6], 1035–1048).

Keywords

Recognition without identification · Familiarity · Valence.

Virtually all human experiences are seen through a filter of emotion, influencing how we perceive and remember events. Emotional stimuli capture our attention (e.g., Nummenmaa et al., 2006) and are remembered better compared with less emotionally laden events (see Kensinger, 2009; Yonelinas & Ritchey, 2015, for reviews). '

Past research has also shown that emotional aspects of an event can be detected and can guide behavior even if identification of the stimulus itself fails. For example, emotion-based learning has been shown to remain intact in individuals with anterograde amnesia. Even though a previous experience with a stimulus cannot be explicitly remembered, these individuals will show memory for the emotional aspects of that stimulus, such as avoiding things that were harmful in the past (Turnbull & Evans, 2006). 

This is illustrated in a classic example from Claparède (1911), who hid a pin in his palm before shaking the hand of an amnesic patient. The next day, the patient had no explicit memory of this or him, but she refused to shake his hand. This is an interesting example of how emotion-based learning can guide our behaviors outside of conscious recollection, and we suspect that similar phenomena are probably present in more everyday experiences. For instance, imagine encountering a familiar name. 

Although you may be unable to identify the person or remember anything specific about him or her, you may have a sense of whether your experience with that person was positive or negative.

The idea that we can access and use information about stimuli even when they cannot be identified has been supported by research on a phenomenon termed recognition without identification (RWI). In the first known demonstration of a list-learning RWI paradigm (Peynircioǧlu, 1990), participants were presented with a word list to study and were later presented with word fragments so that the identity and meaning of the words were obscured (e.g., R _ _ N D _ _ P for the study word RAINDROP). 

The key finding is that, even when participants are unable to identify the word, they can reliably discriminate between old and new test words when asked to make a recognition decision for the fragment. This shows that recognition memory is not entirely conceptually driven, as the concept of the word is not recognized but rather just a particular arrangement of letters that feels familiar.

This method has also been used with other types of stimuli, such that participants are presented with a study list during the encoding phase, and subsequent identification of the test items is hindered or made difficult in some manner. This type of RWI is extremely robust, occurring with visual word fragments (Cleary & Greene, 2000, 2001; Peynircioǧlu, 1990), rapidly fashed masked words (Arndt et al., 2008; Cleary & Greene, 2004, 2005; Morris et al., 2008), phoneme fragments of spoken words (Cleary et al., 2007), picture fragments (Cleary et al., 2004), rapidly fashed masked pictures (Langley et al., 2008), note fragments of songs (Kostic & Cleary, 2009), and even unidentifable odors (Cleary et al., 2010).

The studies above use a list-learning RWI paradigm, but far fewer studies have employed more real-world discrimination tasks that do not involve a study phase. Instead, recognition of obscured test items relies on prior knowledge. For example, Bolte and Goschke (2008) found that participants could discriminate between coherent and scrambled versions of unidentified fragmented line drawings, and this discrimination seems to be based on general knowledge rather than presentation on a study list. 

In a similar nonlist-learning RWI paradigm investigating the influence of pre-experimental familiarity, Cleary et al. (2013) applied a visual noise filter to images of famous actors (Experiment 1) and famous locations (Experiment 2). The filter obscured the images, making them difficult to identify. Similar to Bolte and Goschke, there was no study phase in this experiment; participants simply attempted to identify these images and then gave a familiarity rating. The scenario of greatest interest was when participants could not identify the image. The results showed that even when the filter prevented identification, participants could still discriminate between famous and novel faces/locations.

The funding of an RWI effect relying on pre-experimental familiarity as opposed to a defined study phase led Cleary et al. (2013, Experiment 3) to investigate the possible evolutionary benefits of this phenomenon, focusing on threat detection and the ability to make snap judgments in the face of minimal information. The stimuli were images that varied in threat level (threatening or nonthreatening) and animacy (animate or inanimate) that were filtered to obscure identification. 

There was no study phase in their experiment; participants simply saw each obscured image, tried to identify it, and then rated how familiar it seemed on a scale of 1 to 10. The main finding was that, for images that were not identified, the threatening images were rated as more familiar than the nonthreatening images. Furthermore, this effect was only seen in images depicting living things.

The funding that threatening stimuli were rated as more familiar (Cleary et al., 2013, Experiment 3) is the focus of the present study. The results are intriguing, in part because they seem to represent a departure from prior literature that has shown a strong link between positivity and a sense of familiarity. It has long been theorized that a sense of familiarity helps guide our behaviors toward favorable outcomes, which can range from simple hedonic preferences to survival-related benefits. Indeed, the relationship between familiarity and positivity is deeply entrenched in psychology, beginning with Titchener (1910), who described familiarity as a “glow of warmth . . . a comfortable feeling” (p. 408). 

Since this early observation, there has been much empirical work establishing the relationship between familiarity and affective preference (e.g., Zajonc, 1968; for a review see Garcia-Marques et al., 2013), with the role of processing fluency being identified as a common link. One prominent account of this relationship, the hedonic marking hypothesis (Winkielman et al., 2003), states that a stimulus that is processed relatively fluently, whether due to previous exposure, context, or stimulus qualities, is associated with positive emotional experience. 

In this view, judgments related to familiarity are likewise affected by fluency because familiarity is assumed to be an inherently positive quality. A possible reason that familiarity and positivity are closely linked is that familiarity signals safety relative to the uncertain outcomes associated with encountering novel stimuli. Indeed, stress induction has been shown to increase preferences for the familiar, even when the familiar option is more difficult or time-consuming (Litt et al., 2011), while happy mood induction decreases preferences for the familiar (de Vries et al., 2010). 

Additionally, positive mood has been shown to increase feelings of familiarity (Claypool et al., 2008), as well as attractive faces (Corneille et al., 2005), suggesting that positivity is misattributed to feelings of familiarity. Thus, the strong link between familiarity and positivity is bidirectional.

It is important to note that the ample evidence for the association between positivity and familiarity in the literature utilizes consciously identifiable stimuli. 

However, much less is known about valence recognition for stimuli that are not consciously identifiable due to a visual mask, and the underlying mechanisms are not well understood. However, given that familiarity is typically associated with safety and positive effects (Reber et al., 1998; Westerman et al., 2015; Whittlesea, 1993; Winkielman et al., 2003), and that this link is bidirectional (Claypool et al., 2008; Corneille et al., 2005) one might expect the positive images would be rated as more familiar than the negative images—the opposite of what was found by Cleary et al. (2013). In addition, the images that were used in their study were obtained from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS; Lang et al., 2005). 

This image set includes normed ratings of image familiarity in addition to valence and arousal, and the norms indicate that generally speaking, positive images in the database are rated as more familiar than negative images (Libkuman et al., 2007). Although the images were obscured, research on perception without awareness suggests that participants can often identify the affective information of stimuli that is below the threshold for conscious identification (see Merikle et al., 2001, for review). 

Given this, it would seem that obscured non-threatening images may still be perceived to be more positive than threatening images. Because familiarity is associated with positive affect and given the research suggesting that participants can detect affective information of below threshold stimuli, why did participants rate threatening (i.e., negative) images as more familiar?

In their article, Cleary et al. (2013) theorized that the feeling of familiarity in response to an obscured threatening image could potentially be the result of a bottom-up process serving to direct attention toward potentially threatening situations, and participants attributed the attentional capture as a sense of familiarity. This explanation is consistent with the notion that familiar stimuli seem to “pop out” from their backgrounds (Jacoby, 1991; Q. Wang et al., 1994). However, the effect of threat on attention capture is unclear, with some studies showing threat captures attention (e.g., New & German, 2015) and others showing that it does not (e.g., Calvillo & Hawkins, 2016). 

Interestingly, Calvillo and Hawkins (2016) found that attention capture occurred as a result of animacy, but not threat. Additionally, Öhman et al. (2001) found that attention is only captured by threatening stimuli for people with fears of those items, but they did not find a general effect of threat on attention capture, adding to the inconsistent findings of threat on attention capture.

If the findings of Cleary et al. (2013, Experiment 3) are indeed due to attention capture, this attention capture may be similar to the experience of processing fluency, which, as reviewed above, has been shown to engender a feeling of familiarity for a stimulus (Winkielman et al., 2003). A related possibility is that the early processing of visual information could serve to guide attention to threatening situations using processing fluency. 

Although this seems to be contradicted by the literature showing that positive affect arises from fluent processing, the link between processing fluency, familiarity, and liking may be a result of a later stage of processing that relies on conscious identification of the stimuli. Processing of valence before conscious identification, on the other hand, could be employing a different strategy to guide attention to important aspects of the environment.

A critical factor in research regarding emotion is that emotion varies in two dimensions, valence (whether something is positive or negative) and arousal (the intensity of the emotion). Arousal is an important factor in memory for emotional stimuli, and there is evidence that it may be even more predictive of memory performance than valence for both immediate and delayed recall (Bradley et al., 1992). 

This suggests that the dimensions of valence and arousal have different effects on memory, and this difference is important to account for in experiments aiming to investigate the effects of either dimension. Prior studies have shown that arousal, often measured by amygdala activation or skin conductance responses, can be experienced in response to stimuli that are not consciously identified (Diano et al., 2017; Esteves et al., 1994; Gläscher & Adolphs, 2003; Ohman, 2005), and is thought to be the result of an evolutionary benefit for detecting a threat. 

Additionally, there is some evidence suggesting that physiological arousal may evoke feelings of familiarity. For example, Goldinger and Hansen (2005) found that participants were more likely to classify items as “old” during a recognition test when exposed to an unexplained source of arousal, which was a low-amplitude buzz. 

Similarly, Morris et al. (2008) found a positive relationship between recognition ratings for unidentified masked stimuli and skin conductance responses, suggesting that autonomic arousal induced by the increased cognitive processing of information that is difficult to retrieve may invoke feelings of familiarity. Because the images used by Cleary et al. (2013) were not equated on the arousal dimension, the positive relationship between threat and familiarity ratings may be due to arousal and not valence.

Yet another possible reason that the threatening images were rated as more familiar in the Cleary et al. (2013) experiment, is that the threatening information that comes through the noise filter may generate pause in participants (e.g., Goldinger & Hansen, 2005; Whittlesea, 1997), which may, in turn, initiate top-down motivational processes. Humans want to experience pleasant things and avoid unpleasant things. This is a baseline motivation, and these motivational states can alter conscious perceptions, especially in the face of ambiguity (Balcetis & Dunning, 2006). 

Viewing the Cleary et al. (2013) study in this light, perhaps the absence of motivation for threat detection resulted in a signal that was ambiguous given the inability to consciously identify the image. Because participants are assumed to have a baseline motivation to experience positive things, this could have turned into a distorted signal that there was something notable about the image, which ended up being ascribed to a sense of familiarity, as that was the question at hand.

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