When processing visually presented information, people move their eyes. This eye movement is governed by the employment of a general motor procedure related to direction. In three studies, we show that when subjects re-employ this directional motor procedure (that had been employed in a prior or contemporaneous (unrelated) task) when evaluating a product, a perception of fluency ensues, and this perception of fluency is then misattributed to the product under evaluation and enhances evaluations. We demonstrate the effect for intra-modal (repetition of eye movement) as well as cross-modal (contemporaneous eye and finger movements) settings.
