Attempts to reduce the incidence of false recall with source monitoring

In 5 experiments, the source-monitoring framework was applied to the Deese- Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm, which has received so much interest rece ntly. The authors' goal was to demonstrate that under certain conditions, w hen items in the DRM paradigm were learned from more than 1 origin, the inc idence of false memories would decline. This result was obtained with inter nal-external reality monitoring conditions in free recall (Experiments I an d 3). With more confusable sources that required internal-internal or exter nal-external discriminations, there was no reduction in false recall (Exper iments 2a and 4). In all experiments, participants were willing to assign a n origin to their false memories, even when given an option to claim that t hey were not sure of its source (Experiment 2b). The results are discussed in terms of how source-monitoring principles can sometimes reduce false mem ories in the DRM paradigm.