Time-course studies of reality monitoring and recognition

Two studies used a response-signal procedure to explore the time course of source-monitoring judgments about perceived and imagined events. Ss judged whether probe words corresponded to pictures that had previously been seen or imagined or were new. Old-new recognition accuracy grew to significant levels before reality-monitoring accuracy, supporting the notion that source monitoring requires more of or a different type of information than does old-new recognition. Also, source identification accuracy developed more quickly for imagined items than for perceived items. This difference in time-course functions is consistent with the idea that memories for perceived and imagined events differ in the relative amounts of various types of information they include (Johnson & Raye, 1981) and that these different types of information may revive or become available to source attribution mechanisms at different rates or may be differentially salient during reality monitoring.