Dl. Westerman et Rl. Greene, ON THE GENERALITY OF THE REVELATION EFFECT, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition, 22(5), 1996, pp. 1147-1153
Seven experiments demonstrate the robustness of the revelation effect,
which is the tendency to call recognition test items old if they are
distorted when they initially appear and if they are revealed before t
he recognition judgment. With anagrams as the distortion, a revelation
effect was found in within- and between-subjects designs, in a freque
ncy-judgment task, in a list-discrimination task, when new items were
used as targets, when the study list and the test were presented in di
fferent modalities, and when the word that was revealed did not match
the word that was recognized. These results challenge accounts that at
tribute the revelation effect either to an increase in the familiarity
of the revealed test word or to a positive response bias.