Abstract
The present study investigated how ease of imagery influences source monitoring accuracy. Two experiments were conducted in order to examine how ease of imagery influences the probability of source confusions of perceived and imagined completions of natural symmetric shapes. The stimuli consisted of binary pictures of natural objects, namely symmetric pictures of birds, butterflies, insects, and leaves. The ease of imagery (indicating the similarity of the sources) and the discriminability (indicating the similarity of the items) of each stimulus were estimated in a pretest and included as predictors of the memory performance for these stimuli. It was found that confusion of the sources becomes more likely when the imagery process was relatively easy. However, if the different processes of source monitoring—item memory, source memory and guessing biases—are disentangled, both experiments support the assumption that the effect of decreased source memory for easily imagined stimuli is due to decision processes and misinformation at retrieval rather than encoding processes and memory retention. The data were modeled with a Bayesian hierarchical implementation of the one high threshold source monitoring model.
Highlights
If one is asked to remember whether an event or object has been perceived or imagined, the object itself must be remembered, and the encoding context, in this case the cognitive operation of perceiving or imagining the item, respectively
The present study aims to answer the following question: Does ease of imagery enhance source similarity and following decrease the probability of source memory or does the ease of imagery rather bias the guessing tendencies at recognition? In order to answer that question we relied our experimental approach mainly on the experiments reported by Finke et al [5]
Probability of item memory for complete presented stimuli Probability of item memory for halved presented stimuli Probability of correct rejection of distractor items Probability of source memory for complete presented stimuli Probability of source memory for halved presented stimuli Probability to guess that the item has been presented halved, without source memory Probability to guess that the item has been presented Probability to guess that the item has been presented halved, without source and item memory doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0143694.t001
Summary
If one is asked to remember whether an event or object has been perceived or imagined, the object itself must be remembered, and the encoding context, in this case the cognitive operation of perceiving or imagining the item, respectively. The encoding context of a memorized information is referred to as the source of a memory. It is stored or inferred from episodic memory. Source memory and item memory, need to interact in source monitoring, to come to a decision on the source of a memorized item. This process is influenced by the similarity of the items and the sources. Item memory accuracy decreases with similarity between items and distractors, and likewise, source memory accuracy decreases with similarity between possible sources [1,2,3]
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