Jacoby and Brown presented participants with a list of names to read out loud. The participants were told nothing aobut a memory test. Some time later they were shown a new list of names and asked to rate the each person on this list according to how famous each was. The list included some real, very famous people, some real but not-so-famous people; and also some fictional names. Crucially, the fictional names were of two types: some were names that had occurred on the prior list, some were new. For some participants the "famous" list was prsented right after the "pronunciation" list(1); for other participants, there was a 24-hour delay between these two steps. (1)you have a feeling that the familiar name is distinctive but you also realize why it is distinctive, because you remember your earlier encounter with the name. (2) Thanks to this time span, yhou may not recall the earlier episode of seeing the name in hte pronunciation task. The broad sense of familiarity remains, and so in this setting you might say, "this name rings a bell, and I have no idea why. I guess this must be a famous person." The participants in this study noted that some of the names did "ring a bell" and so did have a certain feeling of familiarity. The false judgements of fame, however, come from the way the participants interpreted this feeling and what conclusions they drew from it.
Tis misattribution is possible, however, because the feeling of familiarity produced by these names was relatively vague, and so open to interpretation. The suggestion, then, is that implicit memories may leave people only with a broad sense that a stimulus is somehow distinctive. What happens after this depends on how they interpret that feeling.

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