The revelation effect: Moderating influences of encoding conditions and type of recognition test

In the revelation effect, slowly revealing a test item immediately prior to a recognition judgment increases the probability of an “old” response. Extant accounts imply that the revelation effect occurs for familiarity-based judgments but not for those involving recall or recollection. To assess this implication, the contribution of recollection was varied by encoding conditions and memory tests. Two manipulations of recollection, semantic encoding and context-item integration, both reduced the revelation effect on a standard recognition test. For the same encoding conditions, a perceptually driven memory test (rhyme recognition) exhibited no revelation effect whatsoever. In a second experiment, the rhyme recognition test exhibited a revelation effect under impoverished encoding conditions. The results document important limits of the revelation effect produced by both encoding and test conditions. Furthermore, the recollection-based limitations of the revelation effect are not restricted to conditions of enhanced semantic encoding.