The mere exposure effect is modulated by selective attention but not visual awareness

• Conscious perceptual duration of faces during BR does not affect their subsequent evaluations.
• Attention modulates evaluations only when faces are consciously dominant but not suppressed.
• The attention modulation effect is not due to attended faces being better memorized.

Repeated exposures to an object will lead to an enhancement of evaluation toward that object. Although this mere exposure effect may occur when the objects are presented subliminally, the role of conscious perception per se on evaluation has never been examined. Here we use a binocular rivalry paradigm to investigate whether a variance in conscious perceptual duration of faces has an effect on their subsequent evaluation, and how selective attention and memory interact with this effect. Our results show that face evaluation is positively biased by selective attention but not affected by visual awareness. Furthermore, this effect is not due to participants recalling which face had been attended to.