INDIVIDUAL AND CULTURAL REALITY MONITORING

What is the relationship between our perceptions, memories, knowledge, beliefs, and expectations, on one hand, and reality, on the other? St udies of individual cognition show that distortions may occur as a by- product of normal reality-monitoring processes. Characterizing the con ditions that increase and decrease such distortions has implications f or understanding, for example, the nature of autobiographical memory, the potential suggestibility of child and adult eyewitnesses, and rece nt controversies about the recovery of repressed memories. Confabulati ons and delusions associated with brain damage, along with data from n euroimaging studies, indicate that the frontal regions of the brain ar e critical in normal reality monitoring. The author argues that realit y monitoring is fundamental not only to individual cognition but also to social/cultural cognition. Social/cultural reality monitoring depen ds on institutions, such as the press and the courts, that function as our cultural frontal lobes. Where does normal social/cultural error i n reality monitoring end and social/cultural pathology begin?