PDF (PhD Thesis Susan Chipchase) - Nottingham eTheses ...

where it fails in these tasks. Whittlesea & Price (2001) argued that recognition
of a stimulus results from the experience of increased fluency of processing
which occurs when a stimulus is encountered again after initial exposure. They
argued that for successful recognition to occur the strategy at retrieval must
enable the experience of this enhanced fluency of processing. In a series of
experiments Whittlesea & Price (2001) demonstrated that different levels of
recognition performance depended on retrieval processing style, which was
manipulated by task instructions. Successful recognition was shown with
nonanalytic strategies at retrieval and failed recognition with analytic strategies
at retrieval. By varying the number of times stimuli were presented they also
demonstrated that level of recognition was sensitive to the amount of pre-
exposure. Nonanalytic strategies of processing at retrieval were induced by
giving participants instructions which gave them no motive to analyse stimuli
for distinctive features, instead they would be motivated to process items
nonanalytically by considering their overall image. Analytic strategies of
processing were induced by giving participants instructions which gave them a
motive to analyse the stimuli for the details of distinctive features. Although
the Whittlesea & Price experiments were primarily designed to understand the
mere exposure effect, they also provide a powerful theoretically motivated
paradigm for exploring retrieval strategy effects in recognition memory. It is on
this basis that the experiments in Chapter 2 and 3 use this paradigm to explore
the retrieval of emotional stimuli.
The exposure durations in the mere exposure paradigm described in
Whittlesea & Price (2001) are much shorter than has been used in previous
research investigating memory and emotion. However, these durations should
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