Reality monitoring judgments of other people’s memories

Abstract

The characteristics of witnesses’ descriptions of events were varied by manipulating the type of covert rehearsal in which witnesses engaged before they described the events. Descriptions were more likely to be attributed by judges to perception than to imagination if witnesses had thought about perceptual aspects of events (e.g., colors and sounds) than if they had thought about apperceptive aspects (thoughts and feelings) before giving their descriptions. Thus, how people think about events may affect how they describe them, and people use some of the same cues to judge the source of other people’s memories as they use in making attributions about the source of their own memories (Johnson & Raye, 1981). © 1989, The Psychonomic Society, Inc.. All rights reserved.