Perceptual fluency
This model for the déjà vu experience was evaluated by Jacoby and Whitehouse (1989), who discovered that when a test word was briefly presented (and masked) at subthreshold levels immediately prior to presentation on a recognition test, individuals were more likely to call the word “old” compared with a word not briefly preceded by itself. They attributed this illusion that the word had occurred on a prior list to its facilitated processing (perceptual fluency) engendered by the immediately prior subliminal presentation. This fluency bias supposedly precipitates the common experience of having a word appear to “jump out from the page” when reading (Jacoby & Dallas, 1981, p. 333).
Similarly, when a primed perceptual element suddenly and forcefully stands out, and source identification is lacking, this may precipitate a déjà vu. Jacoby and Whitehouse related this finding directly to the deja vu phenomenon, but the paradigm is lacking the element of “this could not have happened here before.” In this type of experimental setting, participants logically can misattribute the word to having occurred in the prior experimental list rather than being convinced that they could not have experienced this word before.
There has been debate over whether participants in this particular paradigm are consciously aware of the masked prime word (Bernstein & Welch, 1991; Joordens & Merikle, 1992; Watkins & Gibson, 1988), but this issue does not undermine the potential relevance of this paradigm for modeling the deja vu phenomenon. In fact, a supraliminal perceptual experience corresponds to Titchener’s (1928) illustration above, and modifying the Jacoby-Whitehouse design to have a divided attention manipulation, rather than subliminal presentation, may better model the deja vu experience. Merikle, Smilek, and Eastwood (2001) summarized the literature on perception without awareness and indicated that there are numerous investigations that suggest that stimuli presented either subliminally or supraliminally (but unattended) consistently have a potential to influence subsequent behavior.
This model for the déjà vu experience was evaluated by Jacoby and Whitehouse (1989), who discovered that when a test word was briefly presented (and masked) at subthreshold levels immediately prior to presentation on a recognition test, individuals were more likely to call the word “old” compared with a word not briefly preceded by itself. They attributed this illusion that the word had occurred on a prior list to its facilitated processing (perceptual fluency) engendered by the immediately prior subliminal presentation. This fluency bias supposedly precipitates the common experience of having a word appear to “jump out from the page” when reading (Jacoby & Dallas, 1981, p. 333).
Similarly, when a primed perceptual element suddenly and forcefully stands out, and source identification is lacking, this may precipitate a déjà vu. Jacoby and Whitehouse related this finding directly to the deja vu phenomenon, but the paradigm is lacking the element of “this could not have happened here before.” In this type of experimental setting, participants logically can misattribute the word to having occurred in the prior experimental list rather than being convinced that they could not have experienced this word before.
There has been debate over whether participants in this particular paradigm are consciously aware of the masked prime word (Bernstein & Welch, 1991; Joordens & Merikle, 1992; Watkins & Gibson, 1988), but this issue does not undermine the potential relevance of this paradigm for modeling the deja vu phenomenon. In fact, a supraliminal perceptual experience corresponds to Titchener’s (1928) illustration above, and modifying the Jacoby-Whitehouse design to have a divided attention manipulation, rather than subliminal presentation, may better model the deja vu experience. Merikle, Smilek, and Eastwood (2001) summarized the literature on perception without awareness and indicated that there are numerous investigations that suggest that stimuli presented either subliminally or supraliminally (but unattended) consistently have a potential to influence subsequent behavior.
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