Source-monitoring error

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A source-monitoring error is a type of memory error where the source of a memory is incorrectly attributed to some specific recollected experience. For example, individuals may learn about a current event from a friend, but later report having learned about it on the local news, thus reflecting an incorrect source attribution. This error occurs when normal perceptual and reflective processes are disrupted, either by limited encoding of source information or by disruption to the judgment processes used in source-monitoring. Depression, high stress levels and damage to relevant brain areas are examples of factors that can cause such disruption and hence source-monitoring errors. [1]

Contents

Introduction

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; through these processes, a memory is attributed to a source. Source-monitoring relies heavily on the individual's activated memory records; if anything prevents encoding the contextual details of an event while it happens, relevant information will not be fully retrieved and errors will occur. [1] If the attributes of memory representations are highly differentiated, then fewer errors are expected to occur and vice versa. [2] Two cognitive judgment processes exist regarding source-monitoring; these are commonly called heuristic and systematic judgement processes. [3]

Heuristic judgements

Heuristic judgements are made quickly without the conscious awareness of the individual, making use of perceptual, contextual, and other event-related information. These occur more frequently because they are efficient and occur automatically without the individual putting forth conscious effort. A decision is made about a source when relevant information is of a certain significance and the memory occurring at a certain time or place makes sense logically; errors then occur based on the amount of information stored at encoding or the way that an individual's brain makes decisions based on prior experiences. [4] Within the source-monitoring framework, "heuristic" is a type of decision process; this term is directly related to the psychological heuristics. [1]

Systematic judgements

Systematic judgements are decision processes whose procedures are accessed consciously by the individual; the same types of information used in heuristic judgements are also used in systematic judgements. In this process, all memory-relevant information is retrieved from memory and assessed deliberately to determine whether a memory is likely to have come from a specific source. Systematic judgements occur less frequently in source judgements because they are slow and require a lot of conscious effort. [4] Errors occur due to a misassignment of the weight of certain aspects of memories: assigning high importance to visual information would mean that having poor details of this aspect would be cause for an assumption that the event did not happen or was imagined. Errors will occur if an individual's subjective logic leads them to perceive an event as unlikely to occur or belong to a specific source, even if the truth is otherwise. Simple memory decay can be a source for errors in both judgements, keeping 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, such as events happening in the world surrounding the individual. An example of this is determining which one of an individual's friends said something rude. [1] [5]

Internal source-monitoring

This type of source-monitoring focuses on discriminating between internally derived sources, such as the individual's memories. An example of this is differentiating between memories of thought ideas and spoken ideas. [1] [5]

Reality monitoring

This type, also known as internal-external reality monitoring, is derived from the previous two types and focuses on discriminating between internally and externally retrieved sources. An example of this is discriminating a plane crashing into a building portrayed in real life and in a newspaper. [1] [6] This internal-external distinction also applies to the ability to separate events from our past and imagined future events in our memory. People make fewer reality-monitoring errors when searching memory for future events compared with past events, possibly because the features characterizing future events (e.g., cognitive operations) are used more effectively during reality monitoring than features characterizing past events (e.g., perceptual details). [7] These reality-monitoring errors can be reduced in younger adults for events that have more perceptual details and more cognitive operations. [8] In older adults, the more detailed events do not help reduce these autobiographical reality-monitoring errors, possibly due to limits in processing resources. [8]

Relationship to brain

Observations have been made that indicate a relationship between the prefrontal cortex of the brain and source-monitoring errors. These errors can be seen in everyone, but often are increased in amnesic patients, older adults, and in patients who have 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. The left hemisphere of the prefrontal cortex is involved in systematic judgments and the right hemisphere of the prefrontal cortex is involved in heuristic judgments. [9] Processes which promote the binding or clustering of features, both physically and cognitively during encoding and retrieval, are important to source memory. [10]

Development and aging

Many experiments have been done in an attempt to find whether source-monitoring errors are more prevalent in a particular age group; [11] they are most prevalent in elderly individuals and young children. [11] It has been proposed that source-monitoring errors are common in young children because they have difficulties with differentiating real and imaginary ideas, confirming that young children have difficulties in aspects of reality monitoring. [11] With regards to eyewitness testimony, elderly individuals are more likely to make errors in identifying the source of a memory, making 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. [12] However, older adults do not always exhibit source-monitoring errors, such as when encoded material are visually distinctive as is the case with pictures compared to words. [13] Older adults appear to be unable to expend additional neural resources in the prefrontal cortex in conditions associated with greater demands, thus increasing source-monitoring errors for non-distinctive materials. [14] One exception is older adults with higher cognitive reserve, who may be able to maintain processing resources for longer periods of time and reduce source-monitoring errors compared with older adults with lower cognitive reserve. [15]

Old-new recognition

Old-new recognition is a measurement method used to assess recognition memory. The process is that a participant indicates if an item is new by responding "no" and vice versa. 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 information retrieval difficult (like distractions or stress), or when the judgment processes are impaired in some way. The heuristic and systematic judgment process in particular are suspected to be the similar to those used in source-monitoring, with higher levels of differentiation needed for source-monitoring processes than for recognition. [1]

Remember-know

Remember versus know judgements are processes for evaluating memory awareness, where an individual must distinguish between remembering or knowing. When a memory is remembered, the experience can be relived mentally, and related details are brought to mind without difficulty. When a memory is known, the experience cannot be relived but individuals feel a sense of familiarity, often leading to confident (mis)attribution to a likely source. Both 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. [16]

DRM paradigm

The Deese–Roediger–McDermott paradigm, or DRM paradigm, is a cognitive psychological procedure to study false memory in humans, wherein a list of related words (e.g. bed, rest, awake, tired, dream, wake, snooze, blanket, doze, slumber, snore, nap, peace, yawn, drowsy) is presented to a participant. The individual is then asked to free recall the words from the list, and results often find that subjects falsely remember related words (i.e. sleep) just as often as they recall presented words. [17] This represents a source-monitoring error because participants who recall the non-presented word, they are demonstrating an inability to distinguish if the source of the word is their own thoughts or the list of presented words.

False fame

In the false fame experiment, participants are presented with a list of non-famous names. Later, they are presented with the same names as before, with new non-famous and famous people. The participants then have to determine which names are famous, and the typical finding is that the old non-famous names are often misidentified as famous. This 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. [18]

There have been studies linking individuals who believe in false, abnormal life events (like memories from past lives) to an increased proneness to source-monitoring errors. Specifically, these individuals demonstrate more errors in the false fame task than people who do not have such fabricated memories of abnormal life events. In the case of past-life memories, the sources of certain memories are incorrectly attributed to a previous life. Individuals may falsely believe in the existence of certain people, movies, books, dreams, or imaginary scenarios that never truly happened, making them more likely to misidentify non-famous names as 'famous,' likely as a result of misbelieving the name refers to a famous person from their past life. [19]

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. This may occur because of distractions during initial exposure to information. Even if the information is acquired unconsciously, the area of the brain related to that information will be highly activated for a short amount of time. This may lead a person to generate ideas that were actually acquired from an outside source or personally generated earlier. Heuristic judgement processes are typically used for source judgements; since there was interference during initial exposure, the heuristic processes will likely judge the source of the information to be internally generated. [1]

Source-monitoring errors can occur in both healthy and non-healthy individuals alike. They have been observed in neurological and psychiatric populations such as amnesics, individuals who have undergone a cingulotomy, obsessive compulsive individuals and alcoholics. [20]

Schizophrenia

Source-monitoring errors have been found to be more frequent among individuals with schizophrenia than among individuals without the condition; the inclination to make such errors may be phenotypic and related to hostility. [21] Studies have suggested that source-monitoring difficulties in people with schizophrenia are due to failure encoding the source of self-generated items and the tendency to attribute new items to a previously presented source; another suggestion is that the affected perceive internal stimuli as real events. [21] 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, leading to a deficit called autonoetic agnosia: an impairment in the ability to identify self-generated mental events. [22]

See also

Related Research Articles

Source amnesia is the inability to remember where, when or how previously learned information has been acquired, while retaining the factual knowledge. This branch of amnesia is associated with the malfunctioning of one's explicit memory. It is likely that the disconnect between having the knowledge and remembering the context in which the knowledge was acquired is due to a dissociation between semantic and episodic memory – an individual retains the semantic knowledge, but lacks the episodic knowledge to indicate the context in which the knowledge was gained.

The availability heuristic, also known as availability bias, is a mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples that come to a given person's mind when evaluating a specific topic, concept, method, or decision. This heuristic, operating on the notion that, if something can be recalled, it must be important, or at least more important than alternative solutions not as readily recalled, is inherently biased toward recently acquired information.

Hindsight bias, also known as the knew-it-all-along phenomenon or creeping determinism, is the common tendency for people to perceive past events as having been more predictable than they were.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Brodmann area 45</span> Brain area

Brodmann area 45 (BA45), is part of the frontal cortex in the human brain. It is situated on the lateral surface, inferior to BA9 and adjacent to BA46.

Prospective memory is a form of memory that involves remembering to perform a planned action or recall a planned intention at some future point in time. Prospective memory tasks are common in daily life and range from the relatively simple to extreme life-or-death situations. Examples of simple tasks include remembering to put the toothpaste cap back on, remembering to reply to an email, or remembering to return a rented movie. Examples of highly important situations include a patient remembering to take medication or a pilot remembering to perform specific safety procedures during a flight.

Choice-supportive bias or post-purchase rationalization is the tendency to retroactively ascribe positive attributes to an option one has selected and/or to demote the forgone options. It is part of cognitive science, and is a distinct cognitive bias that occurs once a decision is made. For example, if a person chooses option A instead of option B, they are likely to ignore or downplay the faults of option A while amplifying or ascribing new negative faults to option B. Conversely, they are also likely to notice and amplify the advantages of option A and not notice or de-emphasize those of option B.

Salience is that property by which some thing stands out. Salient events are an attentional mechanism by which organisms learn and survive; those organisms can focus their limited perceptual and cognitive resources on the pertinent subset of the sensory data available to them.

Tip of the tongue is the phenomenon of failing to retrieve a word or term from memory, combined with partial recall and the feeling that retrieval is imminent. The phenomenon's name comes from the saying, "It's on the tip of my tongue." The tip of the tongue phenomenon reveals that lexical access occurs in stages.

In psychology and neuroscience, executive dysfunction, or executive function deficit, is a disruption to the efficacy of the executive functions, which is a group of cognitive processes that regulate, control, and manage other cognitive processes. Executive dysfunction can refer to both neurocognitive deficits and behavioural symptoms. It is implicated in numerous psychopathologies and mental disorders, as well as short-term and long-term changes in non-clinical executive control. Executive dysfunction is the mechanism underlying ADHD Paralysis, and in a broader context, it can encompass other cognitive difficulties like planning, organizing, initiating tasks and regulating emotions. It is a core characteristic of ADHD and can elucidate numerous other recognized symptoms.

Metamemory or Socratic awareness, a type of metacognition, is both the introspective knowledge of one's own memory capabilities and the processes involved in memory self-monitoring. This self-awareness of memory has important implications for how people learn and use memories. When studying, for example, students make judgments of whether they have successfully learned the assigned material and use these decisions, known as "judgments of learning", to allocate study time.

There is evidence suggesting that different processes are involved in remembering something versus knowing whether it is familiar. It appears that "remembering" and "knowing" represent relatively different characteristics of memory as well as reflect different ways of using memory.

Recognition memory, a subcategory of explicit memory, is the ability to recognize previously encountered events, objects, or people. When the previously experienced event is reexperienced, this environmental content is matched to stored memory representations, eliciting matching signals. As first established by psychology experiments in the 1970s, recognition memory for pictures is quite remarkable: humans can remember thousands of images at high accuracy after seeing each only once and only for a few seconds.

Motivated forgetting is a theorized psychological behavior in which people may forget unwanted memories, either consciously or unconsciously. It is an example of defence mechanism, since these are unconscious or conscious coping techniques used to reduce anxiety arising from unacceptable or potentially harmful impulses thus it can be a defence mechanism in some ways. Defence mechanisms are not to be confused with conscious coping strategies.

Memory gaps and errors refer to the incorrect recall, or complete loss, of information in the memory system for a specific detail and/or event. Memory errors may include remembering events that never occurred, or remembering them differently from the way they actually happened. These errors or gaps can occur due to a number of different reasons, including the emotional involvement in the situation, expectations and environmental changes. As the retention interval between encoding and retrieval of the memory lengthens, there is an increase in both the amount that is forgotten, and the likelihood of a memory error occurring.

In psychology, the misattribution of memory or source misattribution is the misidentification of the origin of a memory by the person making the memory recall. Misattribution is likely to occur when individuals are unable to monitor and control the influence of their attitudes, toward their judgments, at the time of retrieval. Misattribution is divided into three components: cryptomnesia, false memories, and source confusion. It was originally noted as one of Daniel Schacter's seven sins of memory.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Childhood memory</span> Early life experiences often memorable for life

Childhood memory refers to memories formed during childhood. Among its other roles, memory functions to guide present behaviour and to predict future outcomes. Memory in childhood is qualitatively and quantitatively different from the memories formed and retrieved in late adolescence and the adult years. Childhood memory research is relatively recent in relation to the study of other types of cognitive processes underpinning behaviour. Understanding the mechanisms by which memories in childhood are encoded and later retrieved has important implications in many areas. Research into childhood memory includes topics such as childhood memory formation and retrieval mechanisms in relation to those in adults, controversies surrounding infantile amnesia and the fact that adults have relatively poor memories of early childhood, the ways in which school environment and family environment influence memory, and the ways in which memory can be improved in childhood to improve overall cognition, performance in school, and well-being, both in childhood and in adulthood.

In psychology, confabulation is a memory error consisting of the production of fabricated, distorted, or misinterpreted memories about oneself or the world. It is generally associated with certain types of brain damage or a specific subset of dementias. While still an area of ongoing research, the basal forebrain is implicated in the phenomenon of confabulation. People who confabulate present with incorrect memories ranging from subtle inaccuracies to surreal fabrications, and may include confusion or distortion in the temporal framing of memories. In general, they are very confident about their recollections, even when challenged with contradictory evidence.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Reconstructive memory</span> A theory of memory recall

Reconstructive memory is a theory of memory recall, in which the act of remembering is influenced by various other cognitive processes including perception, imagination, motivation, semantic memory and beliefs, amongst others. People view their memories as being a coherent and truthful account of episodic memory and believe that their perspective is free from an error during recall. However, the reconstructive process of memory recall is subject to distortion by other intervening cognitive functions such as individual perceptions, social influences, and world knowledge, all of which can lead to errors during reconstruction.

The self-reference effect is a tendency for people to encode information differently depending on whether they are implicated in the information. When people are asked to remember information when it is related in some way to themselves, the recall rate can be improved.

The false tagging theory (FTT) is a neuroanatomical model of a belief and doubt process that proposes a single, unique function for the prefrontal cortex. The theory was developed by neuroscientist Erik Asp. Evidence indicates that prefrontal-cortex-mediated doubting is at the core of executive functioning and may explain some biases of intuitive judgement.

References

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  2. ↑ Landau, J.D., Marsh, R.L. (1997). Monitoring Source in an Unconscious Plagiarism Paradigm. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 4(2), 265–270
  3. ↑ Lindsay, D.S., Johnson, M.K. (1991), Recognition memory and source monitoring. Psychological Bulletin, 29(3), 203–205
  4. 1 2 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.
  5. 1 2 Birren, James; Schaie, K Warner; Abeles, Ronald; Gatz, Margaret; Salthouse, Timothy (2001). Handbook of the Psychology of Aging. Gulf Professional Publishing. p. 356. ISBN   0124114695.
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  7. ↑ McDonough, I. M., & Gallo, D. A. (2010). Separating past and future autobiographical events in memory: Evidence for a reality monitoring asymmetry. Memory & Cognition, 38(1), 3-12.doi:10.3758/MC.38.1.3
  8. 1 2 McDonough, I. M., & Gallo, D. A. (2013). Impaired retrieval monitoring for past and future autobiographical events in older adults. Psychology and Aging, 28(2), 457.doi:10.1037/a0032732
  9. ↑ Gallo, D. A., McDonough, I. M., & Scimeca, J. (2010). Dissociating source memory decisions in the prefrontal cortex: fMRI of diagnostic and disqualifying monitoring. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 22(5), 955-969. doi:10.1162/jocn.2009.21263
  10. ↑ Mitchell, K. J., Johnson, M. K., Raye, C. L., & Greene, E. J. (2004). Prefrontal Cortex Activity Associated with Source Monitoring in a Working Memory Task. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 16(6), 921-934. doi:10.1162/0898929041502724
  11. 1 2 3 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.
  12. ↑ Hashtroudi, S., Johnson, M.K., Chrosniak, L.D. (1989). Aging and Source Monitoring. Psychology and Aging, 4(1), 106–112.
  13. ↑ Gallo, D. A., Cotel, S. C., Moore, C. D., & Schacter, D. L. (2007). Aging can spare recollection-based retrieval monitoring: the importance of event distinctiveness. Psychology and Aging, 22(1), 209.doi:10.1037/0882-7974.22.1.209
  14. ↑ McDonough, I. M., Wong, J. T., & Gallo, D. A. (2013). Age-related differences in prefrontal cortex activity during retrieval monitoring: Testing the compensation and dysfunction accounts. Cerebral Cortex, 23(5), 1049-1060.doi:10.1093/cercor/bhs064
  15. ↑ Kraemer, K. R., Enam, T., & McDonough, I. M. (2019). Cognitive reserve moderates older adults’ memory errors in an autobiographical reality monitoring task. Psychology & neuroscience, 12(2), 247.doi:10.1037/pne0000161
  16. ↑ 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.
  17. ↑ Roediger, H.L., & McDermott, K. B. (1995). Creating false memories: Remembering words not presented in lists. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 24(4), 803–814. "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2014-01-16. Retrieved 2014-01-14.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  18. ↑ 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.
  19. ↑ 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.
  20. ↑ Moritz, S., Woodward, T.S., Ruff, C.C. (2003). Source monitoring and memory confidence in schizophrenia. Psychological Medicine, 33, 131–139.
  21. 1 2 Vinogradov, S. et al. (1997). Clinical and Neurocognitive Aspects of Source Monitoring Errors in Schizophrenia. Am J Psychiatry, 154, 1530–1537.
  22. ↑ 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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