Forty-two individuals studied sixteen word lists, each of which converged on a common list associate that was not studied. Ten measures of individual dierences 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 signi®cantly 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, re¯ect diculties in source monitoring, in particular, in the discrimination of events that originate externally from those that originate internally. #The extent to which memories are accurate re¯ections of past events is a question of great current interest, as well as one with an interesting history (see Roediger, 1996, andSchacter, 1995 for historical reviews). Much recent eort has been aimed at determining the bases upon which individuals decide they are accurately remembering (e.g. Johnson et al., 1993;Johnson and Raye, 1981), and at examining the extent of individuals' phenomenological experiences during remembering (Gardiner, 1988;Tulving, 1985). Just within the last decade, an entirely new focus of study has emerged from this literature in which both the objective and subjective dierences between accurate memories and inaccurate memories are being explored. The majority of this research has centred on the study of memory illusions, and how aspects of the content of inaccurate memories may dier from accurate memories (e.g. Mather et al., in press;Roediger and McDermott, 1995). The motivation for the present research was to examine the extent to which individual dierences in memory performance and phenomenological experiences of remembering might distinguish people who are more susceptible to memory illusions from those who are less susceptible.As Roediger et al. (1998) point out, it is possible not only to distinguish between the susceptibilities of populations, such as young versus old people, but also to identify individual dierences in susceptibility within populations. The literature on the relationship between individual dierences in cognition and personality and the tendency to produce memory errors is not extensive. In general, errors have been CCC 0888±4080/98/SI00S5±23 $17.50 examined in three related areas of research, eyewitness memory, source memory, and autobiographical memory. As there are a number of commonalities between these areas and the present research, each will be brie¯y discussed below. Following a review of this literature, we will turn to the rationale for our experiment.
MEMORY ILLUSIONS IN THE LITERATURESchooler and Loftus (1993) provide a thorough review of studies investigating the relationship between various cognitive and personality measures and the extent to which they predict accuracy and suggestibility in eyewitness memory tasks. Among the measures reviewed are ®eld dependence, locus of control, hypnotic suggestibility, introversion±extroversion, working memory, and intel...
