Task difficulty moderates the revelation effect.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Human Memory
• Decision Making

Background:

• The revelation effect describes how completing a task before a recognition probe leads to a more liberal response criterion.
• Existing research presents conflicting evidence on whether task difficulty influences the magnitude of the revelation effect.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether difficult preceding tasks elicit a larger revelation effect than easy preceding tasks.
• To address confounds present in previous studies examining task difficulty and task presence.

Main Methods:

• Employed novel task difficulty manipulations with 464 participants across six experiments.
• Utilized anagrams and specific arrow key sequence typing tasks, varying in difficulty.

Main Results:

• Despite considerable variability in effect sizes across experiments, a consistent pattern emerged.
• Hard preceding tasks consistently produced larger revelation effects than easy preceding tasks.

Conclusions:

• The findings indicate that task difficulty significantly modulates the revelation effect.
• This study falsifies specific hypotheses about the revelation effect's independence from task difficulty, though the broader theoretical landscape remains open.