Cross-modal source monitoring confusions between perceived and imagined events

Two experiments tested the prediction based on the source monitoring framew ork that imagination is most likely to lead to false memories when related perceived events have occurred. Consistent with this, people were more like ly to falsely remember seeing events when the events had been both imagined as seen and actually heard than when they were just heard, just visually i magined, or imagined both visually and auditorily Furthermore, when people considered potential sources for memories or more carefully evaluated featu res of remembered events, source errors were reduced. On average, misattrib uted ("false") memories differed in phenomenal qualities from true memories . Taken together, these findings show that as different qualities of mental experience flexibly enter into source attributions, qualities derived from related perceptual events are particularly likely to lead to false claims that imagined events were seen, even when the event involves a primary moda lity (auditory) different from the target event (visual).