Cross-modal source monitoring confusions between perceived and imagined events.

Abstract

Two experiments tested the prediction based on the source monitoring framework that imagination is most likely to lead to false memories when related perceived events have occurred. Consistent with this, people were more likely to falsely remember seeing events when the events had been both imagined as seen and actually heard than when they were just heard, just visually imagined, or imagined both visually and auditorily. Furthermore, when people considered potential sources for memories or more carefully evaluated features of remembered events, source errors were reduced. On average, misattributed (false) memories differed in phenomenal qualities from true memories. Taken together, these findings show that as different qualities of mental experience flexibly enter into source attributions, qualities derived from related perceptual events are particularly likely to lead to false claims that imagined events were seen, even when the event involves a primary modality (auditory) different from the target event (visual). Complex memories typically integrate information from a variety of sensory modalities and other sources. Your memory of a visit to your friend's office this morning integrates information derived from perceptual processes, such as the appearance of your friend and the sound of his voice, and information arising from reflective processes, such as your thoughts, evaluations, intentions, inferences, and imagination. Because your perceptual experience is embellished with these reflective processes, you may later have trouble determining whether you actually saw your friend turn on his computer or whether you inferred it from something he said or a movement he made. To complicate matters, various perceptual and reflective experiences represented in memory may have thematic or semantic commonalities, even if they are separated by large gaps in time or involve other sources of information. For example, you may have heard a computer being turned on in another office as you walked back to your office. Later when you think about the visit with your friend, your visual image of him turning on his computer may seem all the more real because your recent memory also includes the sound of a computer. In this