Abstract
The purpose of the present research was to compare memory for an item with memory for the item’s source. Experiment 1 investigated discrimination between two external sources: each item in a list of words was spoken in either a male or a female voice. Subjects received a test of item recognition and a test of source monitoring at each of four delay intervals (immediate, 30 min, 48 h, 1 week). In contrast with previous research, no evidence of differential forgetting rates for item and source information was found. With delay intervals of 0 and 48 h, Experiment 2 replicated Experiment 1 while adding a reality monitoring condition that required discrimination between an internal (i.e., self-generated) and an external source. Subjects were better at making internal-external discriminations than at making external-external discriminations, but both types of source monitoring declined at the same rate as memory for the items themselves.
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We are grateful to Angelle Bourgeois, Craig Neely, Joel Ringdahl, Laurel Salley, and Jennifer Tabor for their assistance in creating the stimuli and gathering data, and to Alan Brown, John Gardiner, Stephanie LeCompte, and Janet McDonald for helpful comments on the manuscript. The authors contributed equally to all phases of the project.
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Bornstein, B.H., Lecompte, D.C. A comparison of item and source forgetting. Psychon Bull Rev 2, 254–259 (1995). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03210966
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03210966