Abstract
The revelation effect is a puzzling phenomenon in which items on a recognition test are more likely to be judged as “old” when they are immediately preceded by a problem-solving task, such as anagram solution. The present experiments were designed to evaluate Westerman and Greene’s (1998) and Hicks and Marsh’s (1998) familiarity-based accounts of this effect. We found comparable revelation effects when probes were preceded by an anagram or a numerical addition task and when subjects performed either one or two of these tasks. Taken together, the results do not support familiarity-based accounts of the revelation effect but are consistent with a proposed decision-based interpretation (i.e.,criterion flux), in which it is assumed that the revelation task displaces the study list context in working memory, leading subjects to adopt a more liberal recognition decision criterion, thereby increasing the hit and false alarm rates.
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This study was supported by an operating grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada to W.E.H. Part of this study was carried out by M.W.N. for his Honours’ thesis.
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Niewiadomski, M.W., Hockley, W.E. Interrupting recognition memory: Tests of familiarity-based accounts of the revelation effect. Memory & Cognition 29, 1130–1138 (2001). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03206382
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03206382