The roles of attention and awareness in the false recognition effect

Jacoby and Whitehouse (1989) reported that masked words can unconsciously bias memory judgments. Others suggest that these results cannot be taken as evidence that words are perceived without awareness, as Jacoby and Whitehouse claimed. In the present experiments, participants' ability to attend to briefly presented context words was manipulated by masking the context words and by an instructional manipulation. In Experiment 1, masked context words increased false recognitions. Different from Jacoby and Whitehouse's results, nonmasked context words showed a similar pattern. In Experiment 2, these effects were replicated and an attended condition was added in which participants read the context words aloud and tried to remember them. False recognition was increased in both masked and unmasked conditions and decreased in the attended condition. These results suggest that the condition for increase or decrease in false recognition is not whether a stimulus is seen or not but whether a stimulus is attended. They suggest that the qualitative difference criterion proposed by Jacoby and Whitehouse is insufficient for determining whether participants are aware of masked presentations.