Is source information automatically available in working memory?

Abstract

(150 words)We often remember information without its source (e.g. word or picture format).This phenomenon has been studied extensively in long-term memory, but rarely in the context of short-term/working memory(WM). It is an open question as to whether source amnesia is the result of forgetting over a prolonged period of time. This study provided a series of striking and novel demonstrations showing participants' inability to report the source of a color representation immediately after that color was used in a task, and stored in memory. These counterintuitive findings occurred when participants repeatedly judged the congruency between two color representations from one single object (i.e., color and identity of a color word) or two distinct objects (i.e., color of a square and identity of a color word) and then were unexpectedly asked to report the source of one color representation. These discoveries suggested that source information was not spontaneously stored into WM. 3In everyday life it is commonplace to remember a fact without its source.For instance, we all have some experience of recognizing a person but being unable to recollect where or when we met that person, or remembering a movie quote without remembering the movie. Most people, though, share the intuition that they will be able to remember the source of information that they have just encountered. Here we explore errors that challenge this intuition, demonstrating frequent source errors for information that was attended and used to perform a task moments before.The phenomenon of failing to remember the source of retrievable information has been variously labeled as source amnesia, source forgetting, source monitoring errors, source misattributions, source errors and so on (Mitchell & Johnson, 2009) and has been extensively studied (e.g., Glisky, Polster, & Routhieaux, 1995;Johnson, Hashtroudi, & Lindsay, 1993;Hollins, Lange, Berry, & Dennis, 2016;Maillet, & Rajah, 2016;Mitchell & Johnson, 2009;Mitchell, Johnson, Raye, & Greene, 2004;2006;Wilding & Rugg, 1996). Source memory is broadly defined as remembered information that specifies how an event was experienced, such as perceptual (e.g., col or, format of a stimulus), spatial-temporal, and affective details (Glisky et al., 1995;Johnson, et al., 1993).Such memory is usually contrasted with item memory which relies on less differentiated information such as familiarity or recency (Glisky et al., 1995;Johnson, et al., 1993). For example, an item memory task usually asks 4 participants to determine whether a probed stimulus was seen before while a source memory task typically requires participants to retrieve associated information, such as which list a word was encountered on (e.g., Wilding & Rugg, 1996), whether a learned stimulus was presented in auditory or visual modality during study (e.g., Bornstein & LeCompte, 1995), or whether a stored semantic representation was acquired from a word or a picture (e.g., Mitchell et al., 2004;2006). Source amnesia has been extensively investigated ...