Event-related potential evidence for multiple causes of the revelation effect

Asking people to discover the identity of a recognition test probe immediately before making a recognition judgment increases the probability of an old judgment. To inform theories of this “revelation effect,” event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded for revealed and intact test items across tw...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Consciousness and cognition 2005-06, Vol.14 (2), p.327-350
Main Authors: Leynes, P. Andrew, Landau, Joshua, Walker, Jessica, Addante, Richard J.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adolescent
Adult
Behavioral psychophysiology
Biological and medical sciences
Electrophysiology
Event-related potentials
Evoked Potentials - physiology
Female
Frontal Lobe - physiology
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Human
Humans
Judgment
Learning. Memory
Male
Memory
Parietal Lobe - physiology
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Recognition
Recognition (Psychology)
Revelation effect
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Summary:Asking people to discover the identity of a recognition test probe immediately before making a recognition judgment increases the probability of an old judgment. To inform theories of this “revelation effect,” event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded for revealed and intact test items across two experiments. In Experiment 1, we used a revelation effect paradigm where half of the test probes were presented as anagrams (i.e., a related task) and the other items were presented intact. The pattern of ERP results from this experiment suggested that revealing an item decreases initial familiarity levels and caused the revealed items to elicit similar levels of activity. In Experiment 2, half of the probes were preceded by an addition task (i.e., an unrelated task). The pattern of ERP effects in this study were distinct from those observed in Experiment 1. More specifically, revealed item ERPs were more negative than intact ERPs at frontal electrodes and more positive at parietal electrodes early in the interval. Later in the epoch, revealed item ERPs were more negative than intact items. These data suggest that related tasks decrease familiarity and alter the signal-to-noise ratio of old and new items, whereas unrelated tasks affect processing in a different way (perhaps by changing decision processes) that also results in the revelation effect. The implications for current theories of the revelation effect are discussed.
ISSN:1053-8100
1090-2376
DOI:10.1016/j.concog.2004.08.005