Relative Fluency: Can prediction–perception discrepancies prime the response required by a subsequent task?

Processing fluency has long been shown to influence perception, judgment, and decision making, yet its functional role in cognitive control remains poorly understood. In particular, it is unclear whether fluency effects merely reflect retrospective evaluations of processing ease or whether they play a forward-looking role in regulating attention and inference. The present study addresses this issue by examining whether discrepancies between predicted and experienced processing fluency can modulate attentional allocation and influence subsequent cognitive processing beyond the stimulus that generates the discrepancy. Across two experiments, we show that stimuli associated with low expected fluency—but processed more efficiently than anticipated—produce robust facilitation effects on subsequent target processing.