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Source monitoring error

Source monitoring error is a form of a memory failure in which information is remembered but the source of that information is falsely associated. While the semantic part of a memory endures, episodic contents, like the time and the place in which that memory was encoded, get mistaken. For example, it may be the case that an individual hears a joke from a friend or family member and later goes on telling the same joke to someone else, or maybe even the same person, being sure to have come up with that joke for oneself.

A source monitoring error can also be seen in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm. Here, people get presented lists of word which they are supposed to learn. Each list contains words belonging to the same implicit theme. A list with the theme "sleep" for example could contain words like "bed", "pillow", "alarm", "night", "mattress" or "dream" but it is important to note that it would not contain the theme word "sleep" itself. Studies showed that participants who learned such a list of words were later on able to correctly identify or reject words that either were or were not in the original list but also often claimed to recognize the implicit theme as a word from the original list. An explanation for this phenomenon by means of source monitoring error is that while learning such a list of words people start thinking about the theme and create a memory of that. Later they identify that word as one they encountered on the list rather than as an object of their own thoughts.

The part of the brain that is most strongly related to source monitoring errors is the frontal cortex. Controlling of what information gets stored as episodic and semantic memory, producing metamemory and connecting information about the context to event memory the frontal cortex plays a big role in encoding what happened and when and where it happened. Interference at that point can cause to weaken the connection between the semantic and the episodic part of a memory. Accordingly, damage to the frontal lobes has been shown to increase source monitoring errors.

Older people as well as people with schizophrenia are more likely to make source monitoring errors than younger or healthy people. While for older people deficits in attentional control processes appear to be the reason, frontal dysfunction seems not to be the cause of increased source monitoring error in people with schizophrenia. In the latter, there seems to be a relation to hostility and studies showed that a lower IQ may also play a role.