Performing an incidental task such as unscrambling an anagram prior to making
a recognition
judgment increases one's confidence that the recognition item had been seen
prior. This
phenomenon is referred to as the revelation effect. We show that the revelation
effect extends to
judgments of one's own childhood autobiography, and that this autobiographical
revelation
effect arises through a complex process involving surprising fluency. Four experiments
are
presented in which participants rated whether particular life events occurred
in their childhood.
When life events contained an anagram to be unscrambled (e.g., "broke a
nwidwo playing ball"),
participants were more confident that the event personally occurred. More important,
this effect
relied on the specific history that one had with unscrambling anagrams. These
results further
point to memory's inherent malleability.