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experience underlying both perceived beauty and judged truth is processing fluency, which is the experienced ease with which mental content is processed. Indeed, stimuli processed with greater ease elicit more and statements that participants can read more easily are more likely to be judged as being true. Researchers invoked processing fluency to help explain a wide range of phenomena, including variations in stock prices, brand preferences, or the lack of reception of mathematical theories that are difficult to understand.
Applied to mathematical reasoning, processing fluency, stemming either from familiarity with problems or from attributes of a task, is predicted to increase intuitively judged truth. As a first step towards testing this assumption, the authors of the study demonstrated in two experiments that symmetry, a feature known to facilitate mental processing and to underlie perceived beauty, is used as heuristic cue to correctness in arithmetic problems.