The revelation effect in metamemory

In recognition tests, items are more likely to be classified as previously studied if they need to be discovered before the recognition decision. In the present experiments, this revelation effect was extended to metamemory judgments. Participants studied word pairs and then tried to recall the second word of each pair when given the first word as a cue. If recall failed, participants gave feeling-of-knowing (FOK) ratings. In Experiment 1, sometimes a partial form of the target was added, and in Experiment 2, sometimes an anagram of the cue was given instead of the cue itself. In both cases, participants gave higher FOK ratings after the words that needed to be revealed even though the items that these FOKs referred to remained unrecalled. Analyses showed a criterion shift but no differences in sensitivity. Results are discussed within the framework of current theories of the revelation effect.