Date of Award

8-9-2022

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Psychology

First Advisor

Heather Kleider-Offutt

Second Advisor

Jessica Turner

Third Advisor

Jeffrey Malins

Abstract

People with vivid imaginations are less accurate at identifying whether memories originated from experience or imagination than people with less vivid imaginations. This can be modeled as a similarity between the memory traces created during vivid imagination and perception, which causes source confusion during recall. The role of visual imagery in this process has been well established, but the role of auditory imagery remains unclear. fMRI data collected from an auditory/visual imagination task was analyzed to determine the relationship between imagery ability, subjective ratings of imagery vividness, neurophysiology, and reality monitoring errors. I predicted that individuals with higher scores on measures of mental imagery would have a greater propensity for reality monitoring errors in both sensory domains. The study’s goal was to increase our understanding of the brain areas involved in reality monitoring and how individual differences in imagery ability contribute to misremembering imagined events as having occurred in reality.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.57709/30362038

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