Eiko Shimojo¹, Shengjie Zheng¹, Shinsuke Shimojo¹; ¹Caltech, Division of Biology & Biological Engineering / Computation and Neural System

People differ in whether they seek familiar or novel experiences in daily life. Visual preference is also shaped by memory: our prior work shows familiarity preference for faces and novelty preference for natural scenes (Park et al., 2010). Here, we asked how individual differences in familiarity/novelty (F/N) preference in a visual task relate to daily-life F/N tendencies and psychological traits. 46 participants completed a 2AFC preference task using image pairs from three categories (Faces, Natural Scenes, Geometric Figures). Familiar images were the median-rated stimuli from a prior evaluation, selected as the “old” stimulus for each participant, and paired with a randomly selected “new” stimulus on each trial. Participants also completed an eight-domain daily-life F/N questionnaire (food, activities, games, etc.), along with the Autism-Spectrum Quotient (AQ), Flow propensity, Maemuki (positive attitude), and Negative Capability scales. We replicated group-level patterns (familiarity preference for faces, novelty preference for natural scenes) and observed substantial individual variability. Participants could be classified into “F/N types” based on their patterns across Faces–Natural Scenes–Geometric Figures (e.g., F–N–N), and these types showed distinct profiles on AQ, Flow, Maemuki, and daily-life F/N seeking, suggesting a potential new personality-profiling axis grounded in memory-driven preferences. Key correlations included: AQ positively related to familiarity preference for geometric figures (r = .24) and for food/cuisine and restaurant/snack choices (both r = .35*); Flow positively related to novelty preference for natural scenes (r = .27); and Maemuki positively related to familiarity preference for faces (r = .22). Higher AQ was associated with lower Maemuki (r = −.31*), stronger daily-life familiarity seeking (r = −.41**), and Flow was strongly associated with Maemuki (r = .62**). However, overall laboratory F/N indices did not correlate with daily-life F/N tendencies (r = −.08), suggesting distinct mechanisms underlying memory-based visual preferences vs. real-world exploration–exploitation.

Acknowledgements: This work was supported by JST【MOONSHOT R&D Program: JPMJMS2295-03.