Abstract

People often make judgments about the valence, pleasantness, or likeability of objects and other stimuli they encounter. These judgments can occur even before a stimulus is processed for meaning (Zajonc, 1980). But, what drives people’s judgments of how much they like an object or how pleasant they deem it to be? Preferences for one object over another have been shown to be based on perceptual features such as symmetry, high figure-ground contrast, object size, and typicality. Moreover, previous experience interacting with an object can increase the perceptual ease or fluency of processing it, which in turn increases positive affect towards the item in question (for a review, see Reber, Schwarz, & Winkielman, 2004). In the current work we review and introduce evidence that preference and valence judgments about stimuli in one’s envi-ronment are also driven, at least in part, by the motor system.