Source monitoring for pictures: an exploration of factors which affect performance

Abstract

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)Source memory refers to memory for details about how information was acquired, as opposed to memory for the information itself. While participants’ memory for some forms of source information has been extensively researched, performance on external source monitoring tasks for visual stimuli has been less frequently examined. As such, the factors that affect performance on visual source monitoring tasks are not as well understood. There were five key aims of this thesis. A novel visual source monitoring task designed to overcome some of the limitations of other visual source monitoring tasks reported in the literature was used to firstly investigate the effect of age on source monitoring. Secondly, the effect of source cue type on source monitoring performance was examined. As a result of poor levels of performance for both children and adults on one of the experimental conditions on the source monitoring task, several experimental manipulations were used to determine whether performance could be improved. Examining the effects of task-based factors such as the provision of elaborative encoding instructions, the provision of intentional encoding instructions, and varying the intrinsic versus extrinsic nature of the stimuli was the third aim of this thesis. The fourth aim was to investigate whether factors based on individual differences, such as anticipation of a source memory task and self-initiated strategy use also improved source monitoring performance. Finally, the relationship between performance on working memory and binding tasks, and source monitoring performance was explored. An underlying theme in the results across the five experiments reported in this thesis was that task manipulations or self-initiated actions that served to increase or facilitate the binding between the item and the source information led to improvements in source monitoring accuracy. This thesis has highlighted the importance of effective binding of visually presented item and source information in order to achieve accurate source monitoring performance