This investigation explores the relationship between liking ratings and recognition performance for obscure classical and Russian music melodies. Past studies have explored if awareness of stimulus presentation affects the mere exposure effect (MEE) (Bornstein, 1989; Bornstein & D'Agostino, 1992). We investigate if the type of awareness (i.e., "remembering" an actual occurrence of hearing the melody vs. "knowing" that one is familiar with the melody in a more general, less contextualised sense; Tulving, 1985) affects the MEE. In Experiment 1, we administered the liking test and the recognition test within the same test block and found that liking ratings for "remembered" melodies were on average higher than those for melodies that were merely "known". Although the recognition data replicate the findings of Gardiner, Kaminska, Dixon, and Java (1996) whereby remember and know responses to a given stimulus react differently to repetition from one to three trials, liking data did not vary with the degree of exposure. In addition, our adoption of the recognition category "guess" resulted in a pattern of results that is not only different from previous studies but illustrates the importance of judged, instead of true, old/new status in determining liking. The basic findings of Experiment 1 were replicated in Experiment 2 in which the liking test was conducted prior to the recognition test. Implications of these findings for theories of MEE are discussed.
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