Interrupting recognition memory: tests of familiarity-based accounts of the revelation effect

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.