“It’s useful to think of attention as a budget that chooses to buy certain pieces of information,” says Adam Alter, a professor of marketing at the Stern School of Business at New York University. “Fluency implies that information comes at a very low cost, often because it is already familiar to us in some similar form. Disfluency occurs when information is costly—perhaps it takes a lot of effort to understand a concept, or a name is unfamiliar and therefore difficult to say.”
