Revelation effect in metamemory

Abstract

Test items are more likely to be judged as previously studied if they need to be discovered before the recognition decision. In the present experiments, this revelation effect was extended to metamemory judgments. Participants studied word pairs and then tried to recall the second word of each pair when given the first word as a cue. In Experiment 1, a fragment of the target was either gradually increased in size or held constant, and in Experiment 2, sometimes an anagram of the cue was given instead of the cue itself. Thus, for some items, there was a revelation task before a recall attempt. If recall failed, the participants gave feeling-of-knowing (FOK) ratings. In both experiments, the participants gave higher FOK ratings after a revelation task, even though the items that these FOKs referred to remained unrecalled. Analyses showed a criterion shift but no differences in sensitivity.