Source Judgments
All judgments about memories or cognitions are metacognitions -- judgments of recency, frequency, source.
Judgment of source
Judging the source of a memory or the context. Did you read it or did someone tell you? Did you do it or only think about it?"Source monitoring is the process in making attributions about the origins of thoughts and memories"
People can accuse the wrong person of a crime -- they saw them near the time it occurred, just not doing the crime.
Tend to base our source judgment on heuristics. If two potential sources are highly similar, more likely to make an error.
Important to distinguish source memory versus item memory when trying to study memory.
Study: ability to identify where pictures were located. Upsetting pictures were the hardest to recall location. Depressed people did particularly poorly.
Vivid memories or people who make vivid memories also remember sources poorly.
MEM model -- multiple-entry modular memory system framework
- people don't label memories with source
- source is judged by experiences at retrieval -- perception, context, semantics, emotion information
- source is also judged by memory of mental operations when encoding
Example: Fame Test. Reading a list of names, told the people are not famous -- but a day later, people started to think maybe they were famous.
People seem to make better recollections if asked specific details and asked how they know the person, but if just asked if they're famous (yes/no), may use only familiarity as a guide. Aging seems to weaken source recall more strongly than it weakens overall recollection.
Current debate: is source judgment a one-step process? If you are asked, did X or Y tell you Z, you are more likely to choose whatever seems more familiar, not necessarily what is true or actually recalled. Prevailing wisdom is that the process is two-part -- recognition AND familiarity. But one-step (familiarity only) explains results in some studies.
Cryptomnesia -- unconscious plagiarism.
Confabulation -- originally thought to be gap-filling, but this is only the case with Korsakoff amnesia. Some indication it is caused by faulty reality monitoring.
Schizophrenia -- hallucination, a difficulty distinguishing events that are internally generated from those that are externally produced.
One theory focuses around reality monitoring. Internal stimulation seems to have an external source -- it's your thought, but it seems like a voice. Likely to make rapid/incorrrect judgments about source of perception. Even when given clues about the unreality of the voices -- knowledge that others could not hear them, that they came in dreams, a belief that they predicted the future -- schizophrenics emphasized this as evidence that the voices were real (bad heuristics!).
Another theory focuses on forward motor model. Before a normal person acts, they make a plan and receive feedback to match their actions so they can correct them. You predict sensory feedback and receive it. But in a schizophrenic person, the internal feedback from one's actions gets distorted. The match between intended action and actual action isn't enough -- the lack of physical feedback or lack of fine-grained monitoring of feedback. Example: you can't actually tickle yourself...unless you are schizophrenic.
Mirror Sign
Self-monitoring deficit -- we look in the mirror and don't recognize ourselves. Or we look in the mirror and see someone younger than oneself.
Reality monitoring deficits in normal individuals
Watch someone's hands under a smock in the mirror -- can seem like your own hands. Moving a mouse or controlling a game. Having a plan in your head can make you think you've done it yourself!
Current area of research: how source and item are bound together in the brain. Model suggests prefrontal cortex activation and medial temporal lobes to bind the pieces together (judgment + source).
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