The Influence Of Conceptual-driving On Familiarity And Deja Vu

When people feel familiar with new things or situations and do not know the source of this sense of familiarity, Deja vuhappens. Because of the lack of consistent induced stimulation, deja vu has been relatively researched less than other topics. Based on Dual-processing Theory of Recognition and Recognition Without Cued Recall Paradigm, by using words and pictures which are semantic related, I want to study the relationship between familiarity and Deja vuand try to verify the hypothesis:If the current picture is semantic related with words and pictures which are watched in the study phases, people tend to feel more familiar with it than pictures without this semantic relationship even though they can not recall the word.This study uses within-subject design.The independent variable is picture types, including three levels:the old pictures, relevant new pictures, irrelevant new pictures.And dependent variable is the familiarity rating of these pictures.The analysis of variance shows the degree of familiarity of old pictures is significantly higher than those semantic-related and semantic-irrelated new pictures even though subjects cannot remember the words or judge these pictures as new, but the familiarity of semantic-related pictures and semantic-irrelated pictures have no difference.The results don’t verify the hypothesis and may indicate concepts of pictures have no effect on familiarity. When we analyze the familiarity of pictures which are judged as "not seen",we can find the familiarity of old pictures are significantly higher than new pictures, which accidentally validates another deja vu hypothesis that one reason of deja vu might be forgetting. If people experience things or situations before and forget, when they reappear again, the individual will misjudge the current situation as new but still has a strong sense of familiarity, that is to say, deja vu happens.