Date

2009

Author

İnan, Aslı Bahar

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The aim of this study was to find if manipulating fluency, that is, the ease of processing, could affect confidence ratings about whether an event occurred in the respondents’ past. To test the familiarity misattribution hypothesis, which states that familiarity caused by fluent processing can be misattributed to past experience if the source of fluency cannot be identified, two methods were used: a revelation task, which was anagram solving and repetition priming. In the revelation task the familiarity misattribution hypothesis and the activation based hypothesis were tested by presenting one of the words in each one of the Life Event Inventory (LEI) items as an anagram or an unrelated anagram before the LEI, respectively. Higher confidence ratings for LEIs with an anagram compared to LEIs without anagrams would indicate that a revelation effect. A revelation effect was not observed for either condition. Therefore, the previous findings of revelation effect for autobiographical memories (Bernstein et al., 2002) could not be replicated when Turkish counterparts of LEI and anagrams were used. In the repetition priming experiments, the participants’ awareness of the source of fluency was manipulated by presenting either a subliminal or a supraliminal prime before they responded to a LEI item. The prime was either the same as the verb of the LEI sentence, or a different verb. Participants gave higher confidence ratings if subliminal primes were identical to, rather than different from, the verb of the sentence. If the participants were aware of seeing the primes, this difference disappeared. These results were consistent with the familiarity misattribution hypothesis.

Subject Keywords

Cognitive sciences., Experimental psychology.

URI

http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/3/12610787/index.pdf
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/18985

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Graduate School of Informatics, Thesis