TIME-COURSE STUDIES OF REALITY MONITORING AND RECOGNITION

Two studies used a response-signal procedure to explore the time cours e of source-monitoring judgments about perceived and imagined events. Ss judged whether probe words corresponded to pictures that had previo usly been seen or imagined or were new. Old-new recognition accuracy g rew to significant levels before reality-monitoring accuracy, supporti ng the notion that source monitoring requires more of or a different t ype of information than does old-new recognition. Also, source identif ication accuracy developed more quickly for imagined items than for pe rceived items. This difference in time-course functions is consistent with the idea that memories for perceived and imagined events differ i n the relative amounts of various types of information they include (J ohnson & Raye, 1981) and that these different types of information may revive or become available to source attribution mechanisms at differ ent rates or may be differentially salient during reality monitoring.