User:Anna Gaidosch/Measuring source monitoring

Measuring source monitoring can be useful in a large variety of settings, including scientific research, clinical settings (e.g. in Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease) and the justice system (e.g. eyewitness testimonies).

Source monitoring can be measured using a source-monitoring task. In these tasks, subjects are asked if items (such as words, sentences or images) have either been presented previously by one of several sources or have not been presented before. Most studies use a two-source, three-response-alternative task, in which items are memorized from two sources, A and B. Subjects are then presented with items from these two sources in combination with new items. They have three response options: They can respond that a test item is old and came from Source A, that it is old and came from Source B, or that it is new. Several varieties of this technique are used to measure external as well as reality monitoring.

For testinhg external source monitoring, some examples of the different sources to be discriminated are words presented on different lists, words presented visually versus acoustically, words presented in front of different backgrounds, or pictures associated with different colors. In measuring reality monitoring, subjects can be asked to discriminate between actually perceived and imagined words or images of objects.

A problematic aspect of this type of memory test is that it combines memory for the item (is the item old or new?) and memory for the source (if the item is old, is it from source A or source B?), resulting in confounding between these two types of memory. In light of this issue, Kevin Murnene and Ute J. Bayen suggest that the technical characteristics and theoretical implications of these measures should be carefully considered before using them to measure source monitoring performance.