Exteroception (vision and hearing) is affective in terms of familiarity and processing speed.

The preference for processing familiar stimuli may result in repeated statements being believed more often.

Exteroception can also influence affect through sensory overload.

At every moment, there is something a person/animal is trying to do (a goal) and a reason they are trying to do it (a context for that goal). In the Affect Management Framework (AMF; Haynes-LaMotte, 2025), contextualized goals are constantly shifting in the brain, informed by the senses of the world and the body (vision, hearing, touch, taste, smell, interoception, and proprioception) as well as the semantic factors of meaningfulness, certainty, and agency.

Because our affect is attached to our goals, what contextualized goals we take on and how and when we choose to pursue or relinquish across similar situations can be described as different affect management policies.

In this post, I hope to expand upon the affective side of exteroception (vision and hearing) as described in the AMF:

Alongside the semantic and interoceptive sources of affect, there also seems to be some amount of affect that can be attributed to exteroceptive processes in the brain. This source of affect provides the strongest support for Error Dynamics Theories, which suggest that affect represents how well predictive processes in the brain are minimizing prediction error (Joffily & Coricelli, 2013; Van de Cruys, 2017; Velasco & Loev, 2021).

Influence of Perceptual Fluency on Affect

Evidence of this includes a series of studies by Reber, Winkielman, and Schwarz (1998) in which they found that participants who were unconsciously primed to recognize stimuli faster reported liking those stimuli more. Many other studies have replicated and extended these findings to support an influence of perceptual fluency on affect (e.g., Halberstadt, 2006; Winkielman, Halberstadt, Fazendeiro, & Catty, 2006), and though it largely operates below conscious awareness, it can lead to some interesting psychological effects.

For example, the illusory truth effect, in which hearing false information........

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