Reality monitoring vs. discriminating between external sources of memories

Abstract

Subjects participated in small groups. Two subjects engaged in a “conversation” in which they alternated generating single words, and other subjects listened to the conversation. Later, speakers were better than other subjects at correctly identifying the origin of words. This held both for a situation in which the subjects had considerable freedom in what they generated (Experiment 1) and for a situation in which what they generated was constrained by specific cues (Experiment 2). The fact that discriminating between externally and internally derived memories was easier than discriminating between two external sources of memories is consistent with the idea that the classes of internally and externally derived memories differ in characteristic ways. © 1980, The psychonomic soceity, inc. All rights reserved.