Host: The Japanese Society for Cognitive Psychology
This study investigated the causal relationship between working memory and source monitoring by giving adult participants dual tasks that would interfere with verbal short-term memory or verbal working memory. It was predicted that the interference of the functioning of working memory would decrease source monitoring accuracy. Forty-three university students participated in this study. A half of them were randomly assigned to the STM interference condition, and the other half to the WM interference condition. All the participants completed working memory tasks. They also did source monitoring tasks three times. In the source monitoring tasks, there were three conditions: the encoding load, the retrieval load, and the control. Regardless of individual differences in the working memory capacity, the STM interference under the encoding load condition and the WM interference under the encoding and retrieval load conditions decreased the accuracy of the source monitoring.
