Creating Illusions of Past Encounter Through Brief Exposure

• Published in: Psychological science Vol. 20; no. 5; pp. 534 - 538
• Main Authors: Brown, Alan S., Marsh, Elizabeth J.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Los Angeles, CA Wiley Periodicals 01.05.2009; SAGE Publications; SAGE PUBLICATIONS, INC
• Subjects: Attention; Attribution; Awareness; Cognition; Cognition & reasoning; Cognitive psychology; Cues; Deja vu; Deja Vu - psychology; Discrimination Learning; Experimental psychology; Experimentation; Eyes & eyesight; False belief; False information; False recall; Humans; Illusions; Information processing; Memory; Memory, Short-Term; Mental stimulation; Methodism; Pattern Recognition, Visual; Personal computers; Photic Stimulation; Psychology; Psychophysics; Recognition; Recognition (Psychology); Research Reports; Sensory perception; Symbols
• ISSN: 0956-7976; 1467-9280; 1467-9280
• DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02337.x

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.