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The revelation effect is the tendency to call an item on a recognition test "old" if it is preceded by a different task interpolated between study and test. Seven experiments explored the generality of the revelation effect across a number of interpolated tasks. A revelation effect emerged when a variety of tasks preceded recognition test items; the effect was found for test items that followed a memory-span task, a synonym-generation task, and a letter-counting task. The compatibility between the test stimuli and the stimuli that composed the interpolated task was found to be a critical factor. With words as stimuli on a recognition test, a revelation effect was found when the stimuli in the interpolated task were words and letters. However, when numbers were the stimuli in the interpolated task, no revelation effect was found.

Seven experiments demonstrate the robustness of the revelation effect, which is the tendency to call recognition test items old if they are distorted when they initially appear and if they are revealed before the recognition judgment. With anagrams as the distortion, a revelation effect was found in within- and between-subjects designs, in a frequency-judgment task, in a list-discrimination task, when new items were used as targets, when the study list and the test were presented in different modalities, and when the word that was revealed did not match the word that was recognized. These results challenge accounts that attribute the revelation effect either to an increase in the familiarity of the revealed test word or to a positive response bias.

A hallmark of the experience of perceptual fluency is the sense that a familiar stimulus seems to pop out from its background, such as when one notices the face of a friend in a crowd of strangers. This experience suggests that fluency-based illusions of recognition memory may be more powerful when there are only a few fluent stimuli presented in a recognition context. The results of the present study were consistent with this prediction. The magnitude of fluency-based illusions of recognition memory was inversely related to the percentage of fluent stimuli on a recognition test. Furthermore, standard fluency manipulations did not impact recognition responses in between-participants designs. The results suggest that illusions of recognition memory may be more powerful when fluency is encountered in a context in which the surrounding stimuli are less fluent.

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