Creating illusions of past encounter through brief exposure.
Titchener (1928) suggested that briefly glancing at a scene could make it appear strangely familiar when it was fully processed moments later. The closest laboratory demonstration used words as stimuli, and showed that briefly glancing at a to-be-judged word increased the subject's belief that it had been presented in an earlier study list (Jacoby & Whitehouse, 1989). We evaluated whether a hasty glance could elicit a false belief in a prior encounter, from a time and place outside of the experiment. This goal precluded using word stimuli, so we had subjects evaluate unfamiliar symbols. Each symbol was preceded by a brief exposure to an identical symbol, a different symbol, or no symbol. A brief glance at an identical symbol increased attributions to preexperimental experience, relative to a glance at a different symbol or no symbol, providing a possible mechanism for common illusions of false recognition.
Brown
Alan S
AS
Department of Psychology, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX 75275, USA. abrown@smu.edu
Marsh
Elizabeth J
EJ
D001288:Attention; D001364:Awareness; D003463:Cues; D003690:Deja Vu / Q000523:psychology; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D006801:Humans; D007088:Illusions; D008570:Memory, Short-Term; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011601:Psychophysics; D021641:Recognition, Psychology