Most people don't go through this mental process. Brand awareness happens beneath the level of cognition anyway. You can show people unfamiliar brands repetit

Most people don't go through this mental process. Brand awareness happens beneath the level of cognition anyway. You can show people unfamiliar brands repetitively in an unobtrusive context and then when you put them all together and deliberately show the person and ask, "how many of these have you seen before?", the answer will usually be "none". But if, before this, you ask them to rate a group of brands, including the ones they've been shown along with some truly new ones -- they will rate the shown group higher on various metrics even though they think they've never seen them before.