William Kunst-Wilson

Who they are

The work of Kunst-Wilson that this site cites is the 1980 report. The Science record lists the authors as W. R. Kunst-Wilson and R. B. Zajonc, in that order, so the paper is credited here to Kunst-Wilson as first author alongside Zajonc, whose 1968 monograph set out the mere exposure effect.

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

Key papers

Affective discrimination of stimuli that cannot be recognized (1980). The paper appeared in Science. Its abstract opens from the observation that animals and people readily develop strong preferences for objects that have become familiar through repeated exposure. It then presents experimental evidence that these preferences can develop when the exposures are so degraded that recognition is precluded.

Key ideas

The report separates liking from recognition. Zajonc's 1968 monograph showed that repeated exposure raises liking, and this paper reports that preferences can develop without the person recognising what they have seen. Daniel Kahneman's account in Thinking, Fast and Slow reports the view that the mere exposure effect does not depend on awareness.

Later work on the effect treats recognition as one of several factors that change its size. Robert Bornstein's 1989 meta-analysis lists stimulus recognition among eight such factors, alongside the type of stimulus, its complexity, the order of presentation, the length of each exposure, the age of the participants, the delay before ratings and the maximum number of presentations.

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