Investigating autobiographical memory by employing a life event inventory

The present study aimed to empirically investigate the revelation effect in autobiographical memory by manipulating cognitive fluency through anagram solving and the Life Event Inventory (LEI). The revelation effect has been robustly demonstrated in recognition memory tasks, particularly when participants complete a preceding task such as solving an anagram, thereby increasing the likelihood of classifying a test item as "old". In this thesis, to enhance cognitive fluency and to determine how the revelation effect processes within autobiographical memory, anagram solving was employed as a manipulation. There are two core theoretical accounts. One of these accounts assumes that increased processing fluency during a task (e.g., anagram solving) is mistakenly attributed to prior experience, leading to increased subjective familiarity which is commonly referred as familiarity misattribution hypothesis. The second account is that discrepancy-attribution hypothesis, it suggests that unexpected fluency, such as solving a difficult anagram with ease, creates a processing discrepancy, which is then misattributed to prior exposure. Rather than simple activation-based accounts, these attribution-based explanations outline the metacognitive conclusions in familiarity judgments. Participants (N = 165) evaluated the probability of autobiographical life event statements occurred in their past in the LEI for both experiments. There were two conditions, which were an anagram or no anagram (pre-cue or sentence-only), and LEI sentences were displayed under these conditions. In the first experiment, anagram solving reliably increased cognitive fluency; thus, there were increased confidence ratings when the anagram appeared within the sentence. However, in the second experiment, the findings indicated that when the anagram appeared as a pre-cue before the sentence, there was a statistically insignificant increase in the familiarity. These results are contribution for understanding how attribution processes affect the construction and accessibility of personally meaningful childhood memories, and it should be note the complexity of cognitive mechanisms underlying the revelation effect in autobiographical memory.