The purpose of the experiments reported in this paper was to examine the possible role of spontaneous imagery and list-specific cues on pictorial encoding effects induced by the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) task. After viewing pictures and words referring to thematically related materials, by way of a picture/word source-judgement task, participants were asked to remember the way in which these materials were presented. Participants reported "seeing" pictures of items that were presented as words, an effect predicted by the imaginal activation hypothesis in its suggestion that incidental images experienced during encoding will later be mistaken as memories for pictures. Whether participants made the same picture misattributions on related lures (or non-presented related items) depended on the way in which the lures' respective thematic lists were experienced during encoding (Experiments 1 and 2), pointing to the effects of list-specific cues in picture/word judgements. These findings have intriguing implications for interpretations of picture-encoding effects induced by the DRM task. The findings also speak to the use of DRM false-memory rates when marshalling evidence against the use of imagery in applied settings.

The authors suggest that, as people experience narratives, they often generate mental responses that parallel responses they make when participating in real-world events. In 2 experiments, they used a think-aloud procedure to explore the range of such participatory responses that participants generated while viewing film excerpts. In Experiment 1, participants viewed film excerpts with sympathetic and unsympathetic characters. The authors used viewers' responses to construct a taxonomy of participatory responses. In Experiment 2, they provided evidence that participatory responses are sensitive to narrative context. They manipulated the level of suspense for excerpts by providing or withholding information about potential negative outcomes and found that viewers generated more participatory responses during suspenseful than nonsuspenseful film excerpts. The authors propose that participatory responses play an important role in how people experience narratives and should be included within theories of narrative comprehension.

Readers rapidly check new information against prior knowledge during validation, but research is inconsistent as to whether source credibility affects validation. We argue that readers are likely to accept highly plausible assertions regardless of source, but that high source credibility may boost acceptance of claims that are less plausible based on general world knowledge. In Experiment 1, participants read narratives with assertions for which the plausibility varied depending on the source. For high credibility sources, we found that readers were faster to read information confirming these assertions relative to contradictory information. We found the opposite patterns for low credibility characters. In Experiment 2, readers read claims from the same high or low credibility sources, but the claims were always plausible based on general world knowledge. Readers consistently took longer to read contradictory information, regardless of source. In Experiment 3, participants read modified versions of "The Tell-Tale Heart," which was narrated entirely by an unreliable source. We manipulated the plausibility of a target event, as well as whether high credibility characters within the story provided confirmatory or contradictory information about the narrator's description of the target event. Though readers rated the narrator as being insane, they were more likely to believe the narrator's assertions about the target event when it was plausible and corroborated by other characters. We argue that sourcing research would benefit from focusing on the relationship between source credibility, message credibility, and multiple sources within a text.

Imagery encoding effects on source-monitoring errors were explored using the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm in two experiments. While viewing thematically related lists embedded in mixed picture/word presentations, participants were asked to generate images of objects or words (Experiment 1) or to simply name the items (Experiment 2). An encoding task intended to induce spontaneous images served as a control for the explicit imagery instruction conditions (Experiment 1). On the picture/word source-monitoring tests, participants were much more likely to report "seeing" a picture of an item presented as a word than the converse particularly when images were induced spontaneously. However, this picture misattribution error was reversed after generating images of words (Experiment 1) and was eliminated after simply labelling the items (Experiment 2). Thus source misattributions were sensitive to the processes giving rise to imagery experiences (spontaneous vs deliberate), the kinds of images generated (object vs word images), and the ways in which materials were presented (as pictures vs words).