Judgments of remembering: the revelation effect in children and adults

When items on a recognition test are presented as a series of increasingly complete fragments rather than being presented initially in their fully intact form, adults' judgments of recognition exhibit an increased tendency to judge items as "old," an illusion of recognition referred to as the revelation effect. The present study used pictorial stimuli to test for a revelation effect with 4-year-olds, 8-year-olds, and adults (N = 76). A reliable revelation effect was found at all ages tested, indicating that the complex fluency-of-processing discrepancy detection and attribution mechanisms thought to be responsible for the effect function similarly across an age range from 4-years-of-age through adulthood. It was also found that the recognition decisions of the 8-year-olds and the adults were affected by how quickly they were able to identify a picture during the revelation phase of the recognition test. This effect was not found with the 4-year-olds, suggesting an age difference in the awareness and strategic use of an implicit memory effect when making explicit judgments of recognition.