The Affective Side of Exteroception
Addressing the question of how affect and vision/hearing are related.
Posted June 4, 2026 | Reviewed by Michelle Quirk
At every moment, there is something a person/animal is trying to do (a goal ) and a reason they are trying to do it (a context for that goal). In the Affect Management Framework (AMF; Haynes-LaMotte, 2025 ), contextualized goals are constantly shifting in the brain, informed by the senses of the world and the body ( vision , hearing , touch , taste , smell , interoception , and proprioception ) as well as the semantic factors of meaningfulness , certainty , and agency .
Because our affect is attached to our goals, what contextualized goals we take on and how and when we choose to pursue or relinquish across similar situations can be described as different affect management policies .
In this post, I hope to expand upon the affective side of exteroception (vision and hearing) as described in the AMF:
Alongside the semantic and interoceptive sources of affect, there also seems to be some amount of affect that can be attributed to exteroceptive processes in the brain. This source of affect provides the strongest support for Error Dynamics Theories, which suggest that affect represents how well predictive processes in the brain are minimizing prediction error (Joffily & Coricelli, 2013; Van de Cruys, 2017; Velasco & Loev, 2021).
Influence of Perceptual Fluency on Affect
Evidence of this includes a series of studies by Reber, Winkielman, and Schwarz (1998) in which they found that participants who were unconsciously primed to recognize stimuli faster reported liking those stimuli more. Many other studies have replicated and extended these findings to support an influence of perceptual fluency on affect (e.g., Halberstadt, 2006; Winkielman, Halberstadt, Fazendeiro, & Catty, 2006), and though it largely operates below conscious awareness, it can lead to some interesting psychological effects.
For example, the illusory truth effect , in which hearing false information repeatedly makes someone more likely to believe it, has been attributed to the influence of perceptual fluency on affect (Fazio, Brashier, Payne, & Marsh, 2015; Hassan & Barber, 2021). In other words, greater perceptual fluency is thought to subconsciously promote more positive affect, which then unknowingly gets misattributed as a stronger belief in the statement. This mixing up of perceptual fluency with a sense of certainty highlights that affect operates as a common evaluative currency between many different processes in the mind, including exteroception. Notably, this illusory truth effect exists even when people have knowledge to counteract the false statements (Fazio et al., 2015).
More recently, researchers have found evidence that the affective nature of exteroception extends beyond perceptual fluency. For example, across five experiments, Topolinski, Erle, and Reber (2015) examined participants’ affective facial reactions after briefly being presented (e.g., 100 ms) with stimuli that either facilitated or obstructed Gestalt completion in early visual processing stages. They found that people’s affective reactions closely tracked the success or failure of early visual processes, with the presentation of impossible shapes producing a negative affective reaction, and this also matched participants’ self-reported affect during the task.
Consistent with this finding, Erle, Reber, and Topolinski (2017) found across five studies that participants expressed greater liking for illusory contour images over other kinds of shapes, and that this was unlikely to be explained by perceptual fluency alone. Investigating later stages of perceptual processes, Lindell, Zickfield, and Reber (2022) measured participants’ affective facial reactions while performing brief perceptual tasks (e.g., switching perspectives on a bi-stable illusion, identifying objects, solving mental rotation problems). Their data supported the idea that affect is constantly being nudged by exteroceptive perception via the success or failure of perceptual processes.
From the AMF perspective, these studies clearly demonstrate that exteroceptive perception plays an important role in the constant updating of contextualized goals in the brain, and that precisely perceiving the outside world represents a general goal that is almost always present and involved in other goals. This explanation is consistent with findings that the brain represents the outside world directly in terms of action affordances (Thornton & Tamir, 2024).
The final way exteroceptive senses have been found to be affective is through sensory overload , in which a person feels overwhelmed with sensory stimuli (Scheydt et al., 2017). It is a more common experience in autism and attention -deficit/hyperactivity disorder (Strömberg, Liman, Bang, & Igelström, 2022), but anyone can experience it given the right environment (e.g., combat, medical ICU). When sensory overload happens, the relevant negative affective state may signal that exteroceptive processing is operating at capacity and incentivize changing the environment to reduce demands on the system.
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Adam Haynes-LaMotte, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist who developed the Affect Management Framework (AMF) and operates a private practice in Seattle.
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