Event-related Potential Measures of the Revelation Effect

Abstract:
Asking people to discover the identity of a recognition test probe prior to making a recognition judgment tends to increase the number of old judgments for both targets and lures. This effect, referred to as the revelation effect, has two viable theoretical explanations. Some hypothesize that this discovery process increases the familiarity of items, thereby making the discovered test probes seem old. Others suggest that the discovery process causes people to adopt a more liberal decision criterion. In the present experiment, we recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) in an attempt to disambiguate these two theoretical explanations. The effects of familiarity have been observed in an old/new ERP effect localized over frontal electrode sites. Thus, we expected to find differences in this component if discovery affected familiarity levels. In contrast, more complex effects were expected if revelation influenced the decision processes. The ERP effects elicited by intact and discovered words were analyzed in a within-subjects design. The data appear to support the liberal decision criteria position.