| The revelation effect is an episodic memory phenomenon where participants are more likely to report that they recognize an item when it has been revealed in some way than when it has not. Although this effect is robust with respect to words, it has not been demonstrated with faces. The present series of experiments examined whether a revelation effect could be produced in face recognition memory. A revelation effect was found in 2 of 3 experiments using only faces for stimuli. Surprisingly, an anti-revelation effect was found in Experiment 4 when words were revealed before face recognition. The findings are discussed in terms of the extant theories for the revelation effect. |
