The study- published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, a prestigious scientific journal of the American Psychological Association (APA) - was led by Guy Grinfeld, a doctoral student at the School of Psychological Sciences, Gershon H. Gordon Faculty of Social Sciences at Tel Aviv University, in collaboration with researchers from Germany, Belgium, and Spain.
The researchers found that repeated images are more likely to be believed as representing a real person, location, or event than images seen for the first time - even when those images were entirely AI-generated. "The study is based on a well-known psychological phenomenon called the 'mere exposure effect,' which suggests that information that we encounter repeatedly is perceived as more credible," Grinfeld explains. "In our research, we sought to examine whether this effect also applies in the visual domain - specifically with images created using artificial intelligence algorithms.
