| Summary: | We encounter ambiguous information every day. Previous research suggests that prior knowledge is necessary for making sense of this information and that such meaning-making is effortless and automatic (Barrett, 2017; Barrett and Bar, 2009). The present study sought to confirm and extend this idea in the visual domain. We hypothesized that participants would be able to disambiguate ambiguous visual information more easily and quickly after exposure to relevant perceptual knowledge. Moreover, we predicted that older participants would have greater success in disambiguating information, even before presentation of relevant perceptual information, given their greater exposure to relevant perceptual experiences over their lifetime. We recruited 68 participants at the Museum of Science, Boston, who rated their ability to see objects in a series of ambiguous (distorted) images both before and after being exposed to a clear (non-distorted) version of the image. In line with our hypotheses, participants rated the ambiguous image as less ambiguous after exposure to the corresponding clear (original) image and did so more quickly. Further, we found that neutral images were more easily and quickly disambiguated than positive or negative images. Overall, these findings reveal the significance of previous experience in alleviating our "experiential blindness" and making sense of the perceptual ambiguities in our world.--Author's abstract
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