REVELATION EFFECT - EFFORT OR PRIMING DOES NOT CREATE THE SENSE OF FAMILIARITY

The revelation effect is the tendency to give higher proportions of positive responses to recognition test items that are distorted. Two plausible explanations of this response bias were tested. The first 3 experiments showed that the sense of familiarity leading to the revelation effect is not created because of the extra time or effort spent on the distorted items. The magnitude of the effect was neither correlated with the time taken to reveal the distorted items nor influenced by the subjects' efforts in revealing such items. The next 4 experiments showed that the sense of familiarity is not created because of priming of target words during the act of revealing. High-frequency words (presumed to be more highly associated to other words) and categorically or orthographically similar words did not elicit greater revelation effects than those elicited with low-frequency words and categorically or orthographically dissimilar words.