Knowing and liking

Abstract

The distinction between knowledge and affect has received two opposing interpretations. One point of view asserts that the two kinds of judgments involve two distinct, qualitatively different systems, and that affective, preference judgments are "immediately" accessible, without mediating cognitive processes. Our position states, in contrast, that knowing and liking are based on different aspects of the same underlying representation, and that evaluative judgments require more complex processing than do descriptive or recognition judgments. Two experiments explored the relative speed of these two kinds of judgments. In the first, liking judgments for words were compared with lexical decision judgments; in the second, a range of paintings was judged for liking and for prior encounters. In both cases, descriptive and recognition judgments occurred more speedily than did the evaluative judgments, and this difference held when the two judgments were matched on discriminability. However, it was noted that if consciousness is viewed as constructive, the phenomenal priority of evaluation may be independent of accessibility and unity of the underlying representation of an event.