Individual differences in susceptibility to memory illusions

Forty-two individuals studied sixteen word lists, each of which converged on a common list associate that was not studied. Ten measures of individual differences in cognition and personality were also administered. The tendency to intrude words in recall and to falsely recognize distractor words in a recognition memory test were significantly correlated with reports of dissociative experiences and vivid mental imagery. It is argued that the memory errors, as well as the reports of dissociative experiences, reflect difficulties in source monitoring, in particular, in the discrimination of events that originate externally from those that originate internally. Copyright © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.