Misattribution in a source monitoring task : Cross-modal source monitoring errors between perceived and imagined events

Abstract

People are likely to have deceptive memories of witnessing an event when the event has been both visually imagined and actually heard. The present study examined whether or not people incorrectly claimed to have witnessed events during a memorizing period. Fifteen of the thirty participants identified the source of the event that they recalled immediately after the memorizing session ended. The other fifteen participants were tested one week later. The results indicated that the participants who were tested later more frequently claimed to have witnessed the events that they had visually imagined and actually heard than those that they had only heard, only imagined to have witnessed, only imagined to have witnessed twice, or imagined as having both witnessed and heard. These finding suggested that due to the confusion of incorrect information from various sources, an event that was actually heard produced a false visual memory over time.