R. Matthew Montoya

Who they are

Montoya's work cited on this site is the 2017 meta-analysis, written with Robert Horton, Jack Vevea, Martyna Citkowicz and Elissa Lauber, which modelled the shape of the relationship between repeated exposure and liking.

This page records only what the papers and their published records state. Biography beyond the cited work is not given here.

Key papers

A re-examination of the mere exposure effect: the influence of repeated exposure on recognition, familiarity, and liking (2017), with Horton, Vevea, Citkowicz and Lauber. The authors meta-analysed the influence of repeated exposure on liking, familiarity, recognition and other evaluations, estimating parameters from 268 curve estimates drawn from 81 articles. The mere exposure effect showed a positive slope and a negative quadratic term, consistent with an inverted U: liking rises with the first exposures and then falls. These curves were associated with all visual stimuli but not with auditory ones, with exposure durations shorter than 10 seconds and longer than a minute, with both homogeneous and heterogeneous presentation, and with ratings taken after all the stimuli had been shown.

Key ideas

The central idea is that more exposure is not always better. The paper concluded that existing models of the mere exposure effect do not adequately account for its findings, and it offered a framework to guide future research.

The result fits with work on advertising wear-out, such as a 1980 study in the Journal of Marketing Research that found repeated television commercials lowered evaluations of both the commercials and the products. It sits less easily with a 2004 music study that found an inverted U for close listening to orchestral excerpts, since the meta-analysis found the curve for visual rather than auditory material.

---