Influences of Fluency and Familiarity Misattribution on Autobiographical Memory Judgments

Abstract

Familiarity caused by fluent processing may be misattributed to past experiences if the source of fluency cannot be determined. This explanation has been presented as the misattribution hypothesis of familiarity to explain the effects of fluency and familiarity in studies using recognition tests on episodic memory. In this study repetition priming was used for autobiographical memory 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. The participants’ awareness of the source of fluency was manipulated by presenting either a subliminal or a supraliminal prime before they responded to a Life Event Inventory (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. Consistent with the hypothesis, if the participants were aware of seeing the primes, this difference disappeared. The results of the experiment showed that manipulating fluency, that is, the ease of processing, could affect confidence ratings about whether an event occurred in the respondents’ past.