Abstract
The revelation effect refers to the phenomenon whereby engaging in a cognitive task before making a recognition judgment increases the probability of old responses. Twenty participants viewed 60 brand names and were asked to judge whether they had known these brands during junior-high school. In half of the trials, the participants judged each brand immediately after solving an anagram. The results showed that solving the anagrams increased old responses for fictitious brand names (false alarms); that is, the revelation effect occurred. In contrast, the effect did not occur for brand names that had existed when the participants were at junior-high school. Given that conscious recollection of fictitious brand names is logically impossible, these findings are consistent with the view that the revelation effect occurs when judgments rely not on recollection but on familiarity processes. The fact that the revelation effect is most noticeable for fictitious brand names suggests that this effect depends more on judgments based on prior knowledge about the brand than on judgments based on the time when the brand was learned.
