Individual Differences in the Susceptibility to the Feature-Positive Effect

Abstract: The feature-positive effect (FPE) is the phenomenon that learning organisms are better at detecting the association between two present stimuli than between the absence of one stimulus and the presence of the other. Although the FPE was first described over 50 years ago, it remains an ill-studied and ill-understood bias. Nonetheless, the FPE can have far-reaching negative consequences in various decision-making contexts. In the present contribution, an attempt was made to document the FPE with a within-subject measurement. Initial psychometric analyses (PCA, Cronbach’s α, test–retest reliability, and concurrent validity correlations) suggest that such intraindividual measurement of the FPE is indeed possible. Consequently, individuals can be expected to differ in their susceptibility to the FPE. This individual difference factor can be measured with the described feature-positive effect test (FPET), which opens new research avenues in which FPE-proneness is taken as a starting point.