Professor：Some researchers did an experiment related to this. What they did was they assembled a group of subjects, a group of students, and they showed these students a series of geometrical shapes. These were very distinctive shapes, a little unusual, not the kind of shapes students often see. But they only showed the students the shapes for a very short period of time, about a second. They also lowered the light in the room to make it even more difficult for the students to see the shapes. So the shapes were there for a split second in dim light and then they were gone.In the next step of the experiment, the researchers again showed the students some shapes, but this time they gave the students a longer time to look at them. And this time they showed the images in pairs, two at a time. In each pair, one shape was a shape the students had already seen for just a split second in dim light. And the other was some other shape that hadn't been shown to them before. After presenting each pair, the researchers asked the students to say which of the two shapes they liked better. Most of the time, the students preferred the shape they’d already seen earlier in the experiment. Now, if you asked them if they’d already seen that shape, they probably wouldn’t know for sure. But that didn’t matter. They still tended to prefer the shapes they’d already seen.
Explain how the experiment described by the professor illustrates the familiarity principle.
Familiarity principle is the tendency that people usually prefer things that they're familiar with to new ones, even when they're unconscious of their exposure to the item. And the professor illustrates this with an experiment. In the experiment, a group of students were first shown several geometrical shapes, which were really uncommon, for a very short period of time in dim light so that they hardly perceived the objects consciously. Then the researchers showed the students a pair of shapes, and allowed them longer time to look at those shapes, one of which was the shape they had seen in dim light in a flash, while the other, a new one. After that the researchers asked these groups of students which shape they preferred because of familiarity principle, they tended to prefer the one they had already seen to the one they hadn't seen even though they were uncertain whether they'd seen the shapes. (161 words)
