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. 2017 Feb:87:108-117.
doi: 10.1016/j.cortex.2016.06.018. Epub 2016 Jul 2.

Monitoring what is real: The effects of modality and action on accuracy and type of reality monitoring error

Jane R Garrison  1 , Rebecca Bond  2 , Emma Gibbard  2 , Marcia K Johnson  3 , Jon S Simons  4
Affiliations

Monitoring what is real: The effects of modality and action on accuracy and type of reality monitoring error

Jane R Garrison et al. Cortex. 2017 Feb.

Abstract

Reality monitoring refers to processes involved in distinguishing internally generated information from information presented in the external world, an activity thought to be based, in part, on assessment of activated features such as the amount and type of cognitive operations and perceptual content. Impairment in reality monitoring has been implicated in symptoms of mental illness and associated more widely with the occurrence of anomalous perceptions as well as false memories and beliefs. In the present experiment, the cognitive mechanisms of reality monitoring were probed in healthy individuals using a task that investigated the effects of stimulus modality (auditory vs visual) and the type of action undertaken during encoding (thought vs speech) on subsequent source memory. There was reduced source accuracy for auditory stimuli compared with visual, and when encoding was accompanied by thought as opposed to speech, and a greater rate of externalization than internalization errors that was stable across factors. Interpreted within the source monitoring framework (Johnson, Hashtroudi, & Lindsay, 1993), the results are consistent with the greater prevalence of clinically observed auditory than visual reality discrimination failures. The significance of these findings is discussed in light of theories of hallucinations, delusions and confabulation.

Keywords: Confabulation; Delusions; Hallucinations; Reality monitoring; Schizophrenia.

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Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Examples of task stimuli. Note: red text indicates auditory presentation. Three different voices were used to record the word-pairs to ensure variety, and the task was fully counterbalanced across participants for the use of voices, the presentation of word-pairs as perceived, imagined and new, and for the order of the eight blocks (two per four study phase conditions).
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Reality monitoring accuracy for perceived and imagined trials. Note: Error bars represent ±standard error of the mean.
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Misattribution errors.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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