Source-Monitoring Error is a type of memory error whereby the source of a memory is attributed to times, places, or people that are not the memory's actual source. These errors can occur for a multitude of reasons but more specifically they occur either as a result of poor initial encoding of the events (e.g., the perceptual, contextual, affective, semantic, or cognitive processing information are disrupted resulting in limited encoding) or either of the two broad judgement processes used in source-monitoring (heuristic and systematic) are disrupted when the time comes to determine a memory's source. Factors that may illicit source-monitoring errors are time constraints, high levels of stress, depression, distractions, alcohol and drug use, or damage to relevant brain areas.^[1]

Cognitive Processes

One of the key ideas behind source monitoring is that rather than receiving an actual label for a memory during processing, a person's memory records are activated and evaluated through decision processes and through these processes a memory is attributed to a source. Source monitoring relies heavily on the individual's activated memory records, if anything prevents an individual from encoding the contextual details of an event while it happens, relevant information will not be easily (or entirely) retrieved and errors may occur.^[1] If the attributes of memory representations are highly differentiated (many details to help tell events apart) then fewer errors are expected to occur. But, when the attributes of memory representation are difficult to tell apart (memories for events blending together) memories are more likely to occur because the specific source is difficult to identify.^[2] There are two cognitive judgment processes that have been implicated and studied regarding source monitoring and they go by many different names but are commonly called Heuristic and Systematic judgement processes.^[3]

Heuristic Judgements

Many source-monitoring decisions are made quickly without the conscious awareness of the individual, making use of perceptual, contextual, and other event-related information in their decision-making criteria. This type of source-monitoring judgement is called heuristic but has also been called automatic. Heurisitc judgements in source monitoring occur more frequently because they are efficient and occur automatically without the individual putting forth conscious effort. Cognitively, it is suggested that a decision is made about a given source if event-related information is of a certain quantity or vividness and if the memory occurring at a certain time or place makes sense logically (semantics). Errors occur based on the amount of information stored at encoding (too little information will potentially lead to the real source being dismissed) or the way that an individual's brain may make the decisions based on prior experiences.^[4] Although within the source-monitoring framework "heurisitc" is a type of decision process, this term is directly related to the psychological term heuristics.^[1]

Systematic Judgements

In contrast to heuristic source-monitoring judgements, systematic judgements are a more analytic and effortful decision process whose procedures are accessed consciously by the individual. The same types of event-related information used in heurisitc judgements are also used in systematic judgements. In this process all memory-relevant information is retrieved from memory and assessed very deliberately to determine whether a memory is likely to have come from a specific source. Systematic judgements occur less frequently in source judgements mainly because they are slow and require a lot of conscious effort.^[4] Errors occur because of the weight an individual assigns to certain aspects of their memories. Assigning high importance to visual information would mean that having poor recollection for the visual aspects of an event would lead an individual to assume that the event didn't happen or was imagined. As well, errors will occur if an individual's subjective logic leads them to perceive an event or memory as unlikely to occur or to belong to a specific source, even if the unlikely event did happen and was the source of the memory. Simple memory decay can also be a source for errors in systematic (as well as heuristic) judgements, which would keep an individual from accessing relevant memory information, leading to source-monitoring errors.^[1]

Types

There are three major types of source monitoring: external source monitoring, internal source monitoring, and reality monitoring, all of which are susceptible to errors and make use of the two judgment processes.^[1]

External Source Monitoring

This type of source monitoring focuses on discriminating between externally retrieved sources; memories for events that happen in the world surrounding the individual. An example of external source monitoring would be determining which one of your friends said something incredibly rude.^[1]

Internal Source Monitoring

This type of source monitoring focuses on discriminating between internally derived sources; the individual's memories. An example of internal source monitoring would be differentiating between memories of what one thought and memories of what one said.^[1]

Reality Monitoring

Also known in this case as Internal-External Reality Monitoring, reality monitoring focuses on discriminating between internally derived sources and externally retrieved sources. Example: Did you imagine that a plane crashed into a building, or did you see that a plane crashed into a building on the news.^[1]^[5]

Brain Areas

Observations have been made that indicate a relationship between the frontal areas of the brain and source monitoring errors. These errors can be seen in amnesic patients, older adults, and in patients suffering from organic brain disease with frontal lobe damage. ^[1]

There are many processes that occur in the frontal regions that are important for source monitoring. These include circuits linked with the hippocampus that encourage feature binding, and structures that play a role in strategic retrieval. ^[6] Processes which promote the binding together of features, or the clustering of features, both physically and cognitively, during encoding and retrieval are important to source memory.^[7]

Related Phenomena

Old-New Recognition

Old-New Recognition is a measurement method used to assess a simple form of recognition. The process is simple with a participant indicating if an item is new to them by responding "no" and responding with "yes" if they recognize the object as presented earlier in the experiment. Errors can occur in this form of recognition in a similar fashion to how they occur in source monitoring; errors occur more frequently when objects are very similar, when circumstances of the situation make acquisition of useful information difficult (e.g.,distractions or stress), or when the judgment processes are impaired in some way. The heuristic and systematic judgment process in particular could be the same or similar to the those used in source monitoring. Although similar, it seems that higher levels of differentiation are needed for source-monitoring processes than for recognition.^[1]

False Fame

In the False-Fame Paradigm the names of non-famous individuals are judged to be famous by the participants of a study based solely on previous exposure to those names. In a study of false fame, participants are presented with a list of non-famous names and later those same participants are presented with the old (previously presented) non-famous names, new non-famous names, and the names of actually famous people. The participants are to make "fame judgements" for each name presented and the typical finding is that the old non-famous names are often identified (incorrectly) as famous. Essentially, incorrectly naming a non-famous person as famous is a source-monitoring error because they have attributed the name's actual origin to a source other than the list where they originally read it.^[8]

There have been studies linking individuals who believe in abnormal life events to an increased proneness to source-monitoring errors. Specifically, these individuals demonstrate more errors in the false-fame task than people who do not believe in these abnormal life events. Examples of abnormal life event memories include believing that they had been abducted by aliens, and having memories from a previous life, but which only appeared after hypnosis therapy. In the case of reincarnation memories, the source of certain memories are attributed to the the previous life, but the source of certain memories could come from any number of places. Other people, movies, books, dreams, or an imaginary scenario could generate memories that are then incorrectly attributed to having come from a previous life.^[9]

Cryptomnesia

Cryptomnesia is unintentional plagiarism occurring when a person produces something believing that it was self-generated, when it was actually generated earlier, either internally or by an external source. Cryptomnesia may occur because of distractions during initial exposure to information. Even if the information is acquired outside of conscious awareness, the area of the brain related to that information will be highly activated at least for a short amount of time. Since the areas are activated this can lead a person to "generate" new ideas that were actually acquired from an outside source or personally generated earlier. Heuristic judgement processes are typically used for source judgements in cryptomnesia. Since there was interference during initial exposure, the heuristic processes will likely judge the source of the information to be internally generated, at that moment.^[1]

Eyewitness Memory

Eyewitness testimony can be a very convincing method for winning over a jury in a court of law. Unfortunately it has been found through research that source-monitoring error is prevalent in eyewitnesses, and can be cause for the mistaken positive identification of an innocent person from a lineup. ^[10] The standard suggestibility test is often used to study eyewitness errors. This method provides the subject with visual information, verbal misinformation, and then tests for their memory of the information that was visually presented. During the testing, many subjects claim to have seen things in the visual portion which were actually presented to them verbally, which suggests that there is a misattribution of source. ^[1] Studies have also been done on the mugshot exposure effect, which occurs when photographs are shown to eyewitnesses prior to viewing a lineup. It has been found that participants are more likely to falsely identify someone as guilty after viewing their mugshot. A source error may occur when the subject believes they recognize someone in the lineup as being the perpetrator, when in reality they are recognizing them because they have previously been exposed to their photograph. ^[10] Source monitoring errors are also more common when the subject considers misleading information to be a tangent of the event rather than a completely separate event. This could be an issue if the witness has multiple sources of information on the events of the crime such as news reports or other eyewitness accounts, which can be confused with the actual series of events they witnessed. It has also been demonstrated that source monitoring errors are more likely to occur when the subject is stressed during recall or distracted while the misinformation is introduced. This may be because stress inhibits processes that produce source cues. ^[1]

False Memories

People often create memories that they believe to be true, however, in reality they are based on their imagination or something they have drawn from a situation.^[6] It has been shown through experiment that participants sometimes claim to have seen pictures that they have only ever been asked to imagine, and those with strong imaginations are more likely to believe they have perceived something they have actually imagined. Self-created information that has a high level of detail may induce source errors because it is similar to information from actual perceived events. A study was done to compare source memory for images that participants imagined to those that they actually saw. Results showed that participants showed greater activity in the precuneus while encoding for images that were imagined, and later identified as seen, when compared to images accurately identified as imagined. Neuroimaging has shown that areas in the posterior region of the brain are responsible for differentiating between true and false visual memories. The level of processing of the perceptual information may determine whether a source error is made. Behavioural evidence has suggested that subjects can be aware that they are generating false information, however when later tested they misattributed the information, believing it was true.^[7]

Remember-Know

Remember versus Know is a judgement process for evaluating memory awareness where an inidivudal must distinguish between two states of awareness about a memory: remembering, or knowing. When a memory is remembered the experience or occurrence can be "relived" mentally, and related perceptual and contextual details are brought to mind without difficulty. When a memory is judged to be known it means that the individual cannot relive the experience mentally but they feel a sense of familiarity, which often leads to confident attribution (or misattribution) to a likely source. Both remember and know judgements are subject to source monitoring errors and it has been demonstrated that under some circumstances (such as in the DRM paradigm) remember judgements are more likely to occur.^[11]

DRM Paradigm

The Deese-Roediger-McDermott Paradigm often shortened to the DRM paradigm is a false memory phenomenon in which individuals recall having seen or heard a word in a list when only semantically related words had been presented. To study this phenomenon, lists of varying length are presented to individuals and afterwards the experimenter asks them if they had seen a specific word. The word they usually ask tends to be heavily semantically related to the words in the list but was not actually on it. An example of this procedure would be presenting words that are distinctly related to the word sleep (pillow, bed, night, dreams, etc.) and then asking the participant if they had heard the word "sleep"(called the critical word) in the list. With strong certainty, participants will frequently claim that they had seen the critical word at least as often as words that were actually on the list.^[11] In a DRM paradigm experiment, the critical word is incorrectly identified as being within the list of presented words when the word occurs as a result of internally generated associatons.^[9]

Aging

Many experiments have been done in an attempt to find whether source monitoring error is more prevalent in a particular age group. Everyday observations have shown that in the average adult, memory for source is flawed.^[12] While research has shown that source-monitoring errors can occur in anybody, they are most prevalent in elderly individuals and young children.^[12] It has been proposed that source-monitoring errors are common in young children because they have some difficulties with differentiating what is real and what is imaginary, which confirms that young children have difficulties in some aspects of reality monitoring.^[12] When a group of young and old subjects were tested to remember the source of words they either read, or produced to fill in blank sentences, the old group made more source monitoring errors.^[12] With regards to eyewitness testimony, elderly individuals are more likely to make errors in identifying the source of a memory, which would make them more susceptible to misleading information. Reality monitoring may often lead to source-monitoring errors because a memory may not be typical of its original class. For example, if an internal memory contains a large amount of sensory information, it may be incorrectly recalled as externally retrieved.^[13]Through experimentation, it was found that older adults did not differ from younger adults in remembering the source of information. Source-monitoring error is a common mistake that can occur in both healthy and non-healthy people, young or old, however, some individuals are more susceptible to it than others.

Related Disorders

Source monitoring error can occur in both healthy and non-healthy individuals alike. It has been observed in neurological and psychiatric populations such as amnesic, individuals who have undergone a cinglectomy, obsessive compulsive (OCD) individuals, and alcoholics.^[14]

Schizophrenia

Source-monitoring errors have been found to be more frequent amongschizophrenic individuals than among healthy individuals. Studies have suggested that source-monitoring difficulties in schizophrenics are due to two separate deficits: a failure to encode the source of self-generated items, and the tendency to attribute new items to a previously presented source. ^[15] Experiments have shown that significantly more source monitoring errors were made by schizophrenic individuals than in individuals without schizophrenia, that being said, the inclination to make the errors may be more trait like and related to hostility. ^[15] One reason source monitoring errors may occur in schizophrenics is because patients regularly describe a world in which internal stimuli are mistaken as real events. ^[15] Several of the symptoms associated with schizophrenia imply that patients with the disorder are not capable of monitoring the initiation of certain kinds of self-generated thought, this leads to a deficit called “autonetic agnosia” ; an impairment in the ability to identify self-generated mental events.^[16]

References

^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f ^g ^h ⁱ ^j ^k ^l ^m Johnson, M.K., Hashtroudi, S., Lindsay, D.S. (1993). Source Monitoring. Psychological Bulletin, 114(1), 3-28
^ Landau, J.D., Marsh, R.L. (1997). Monitoring Source in an Unconscious Plagiarism Paradigm. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 4(2), 265-270
^ Lindsay, D.S., Johnson, M.K. (1991), Recognition memory and source monitoring. Psychological Bulletin, 29(3), 203-205
^ ^a ^b Chaiken, S., Liberman, A., Eagly, A.H. (1989). Heuristic and Systematic Information Processing within and beyond the persuasion Context. In J.S. Uleman, & J.A. Bargh (Eds.), Unintended Thought (pp. 212-252). New York: The Guilford Press.
^ McDaniel, M.A., Lyle, K.B., Butler, K.M., & Dornburg, C.C. (2008). Age-Related Deficits in Reality Monitoring. Psychology and Aging, 23(3), 646-656.
^ ^a ^b Johnson, M.K. (1997) Source Monitoring and Memory Distortion. “Phil.Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B”, 352, 1733-1745
^ ^a ^b Johnson,M.K., Mitchell, K.J. (2009). Source Monitoring 15 Years Later: What Have We Learned From fMRI About the Neural Mechanisms of Source Memory?. “Psychological Bulletin”, 135(4), 638-677
^ Jacoby, L.L., Kelley, C., Brown, J., & Jasechko, J. (1989). Becoming Famous Overnight: Limits on the Ability to Avoid Unconscious Influences of the Past. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 56(3), 326-338.
^ ^a ^b Peters, M.J.V., Horselenberg, R., Jelicic, M., Merckelbach, H. (2007). The false fame illusion in people with memories about a previous life. Consciousness and Cognition, 16, 162-169.
^ ^a ^b Goodsell, C.A., Gronlund, S.D., Neuschatz, J.S. (2008). Effects of Mugshot Commitment on Lineup Performance in Young and Older Adults. Applied cognitive Psychology,23,788-803
^ ^a ^b Roediger III, H.L., & McDermott, K.B. (1995). Creating False Memories: Remembering Words not Presented in Lists. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 21(4), 803-814.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d Cohen, G., Faulkner, D. (1989). Age Differences in Source Forgetting: Effects on Reality Monitoring and on Eyewitness Testimony. Psychology and Aging, 4(1), 10-17.
^ Hashtroudi, S., Johnson, M.K., Chrosniak, L.D. (1989). Aging and Source Monitoring. Psychology and Aging, 4(1), 106-112.
^ Moritz, S., Woodward, T.S., Ruff, C.C. (2003). Source monitoring and memory confidence in schizophrenia. Psychological Medicine, 33, 131-139.
^ ^a ^b ^c Vinogradov, S. et al. (1997). Clinical and Neurocognitive Aspects of Source Monitoring Errors in Schizophrenia. Am J Psychiatry, 154, 1530-1537.
^ Keefe, R.S.E. et al. (1999). Source monitoring deficits in patients with schizophrenia; a multinomial modeling analysis. Psychological Medicine, 29, 903-914.

[Johnson1-1] ^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f ^g ^h ⁱ ^j ^k ^l ^m Johnson, M.K., Hashtroudi, S., Lindsay, D.S. (1993). Source Monitoring. Psychological Bulletin, 114(1), 3-28

[Landau1-2] Landau, J.D., Marsh, R.L. (1997). Monitoring Source in an Unconscious Plagiarism Paradigm. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 4(2), 265-270

[Lindsay1-3] Lindsay, D.S., Johnson, M.K. (1991), Recognition memory and source monitoring. Psychological Bulletin, 29(3), 203-205

[Chaiken1-4] Chaiken, S., Liberman, A., Eagly, A.H. (1989). Heuristic and Systematic Information Processing within and beyond the persuasion Context. In J.S. Uleman, & J.A. Bargh (Eds.), Unintended Thought (pp. 212-252). New York: The Guilford Press.

[McDaniel1-5] McDaniel, M.A., Lyle, K.B., Butler, K.M., & Dornburg, C.C. (2008). Age-Related Deficits in Reality Monitoring. Psychology and Aging, 23(3), 646-656.

[“Johnson3”-6] Johnson, M.K. (1997) Source Monitoring and Memory Distortion. “Phil.Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B”, 352, 1733-1745

[Johnson2-7] Johnson,M.K., Mitchell, K.J. (2009). Source Monitoring 15 Years Later: What Have We Learned From fMRI About the Neural Mechanisms of Source Memory?. “Psychological Bulletin”, 135(4), 638-677

[Jacoby1-8] Jacoby, L.L., Kelley, C., Brown, J., & Jasechko, J. (1989). Becoming Famous Overnight: Limits on the Ability to Avoid Unconscious Influences of the Past. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 56(3), 326-338.

[Peters1-9] Peters, M.J.V., Horselenberg, R., Jelicic, M., Merckelbach, H. (2007). The false fame illusion in people with memories about a previous life. Consciousness and Cognition, 16, 162-169.

[Goodsell1-10] Goodsell, C.A., Gronlund, S.D., Neuschatz, J.S. (2008). Effects of Mugshot Commitment on Lineup Performance in Young and Older Adults. Applied cognitive Psychology,23,788-803

[Roediger1-11] Roediger III, H.L., & McDermott, K.B. (1995). Creating False Memories: Remembering Words not Presented in Lists. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 21(4), 803-814.

[Cohen1-12] Cohen, G., Faulkner, D. (1989). Age Differences in Source Forgetting: Effects on Reality Monitoring and on Eyewitness Testimony. Psychology and Aging, 4(1), 10-17.

[Hashtroudi1-13] Hashtroudi, S., Johnson, M.K., Chrosniak, L.D. (1989). Aging and Source Monitoring. Psychology and Aging, 4(1), 106-112.

[Moritz1-14] Moritz, S., Woodward, T.S., Ruff, C.C. (2003). Source monitoring and memory confidence in schizophrenia. Psychological Medicine, 33, 131-139.

[Vinogradov1-15] Vinogradov, S. et al. (1997). Clinical and Neurocognitive Aspects of Source Monitoring Errors in Schizophrenia. Am J Psychiatry, 154, 1530-1537.

[Keefe1-16] Keefe, R.S.E. et al. (1999). Source monitoring deficits in patients with schizophrenia; a multinomial modeling analysis. Psychological Medicine, 29, 903-914.

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