Source amnesia
Source amnesia is the inability to remember where, when or how previously learned information has been acquired, while retaining the factual knowledge.
[3] Source monitoring involves a systematic process of slow and deliberate thought of where information was originally learned.
Those individuals with frontal lobe damage have normal recall of facts, but they make significantly more errors in source memory than control subjects, with these effects becoming apparent as shortly as 5 minutes after the learning experience.
Compared to younger individuals, in experiments where the individuals are presented with obscure or even made up trivia facts, older people remember less information overall in both recall and recognition tasks and they often misattribute the source of their knowledge, at time periods of both long and short delays.
[7] Alzheimer's disease (AD), which is known to be associated with frontal lobe dysfunction,[12] is implicated as a cause of source amnesia.
[13] This lack of ability to attribute the source of memories is likely related to AD patients' deficits in reality monitoring.
Schizophrenia is associated with episodic memory deficits often characterized by a confusion of internal stimuli and real events.
[3] Individuals with schizophrenia who display source memory deficits often do so due to reality-monitoring dysfunction, which is a contributing factor towards the hallucinations that characterize the disorder.
[17] The hallucinations that characterize schizophrenia are a result of deficit in reality monitoring – they exhibit an inability to differentiate between internally and externally derived information.
Those with PTSD may have poorer recall for the source of their knowledge due to deficits in the encoding process which creates weaker relationships between the item and its context.
These individuals typically have no recall of the hypnotic experience whatsoever; however, when tested on these obscure pieces of knowledge they are able to supply the correct answer, demonstrating their source amnesia.
Patients with frontal lobe dysfunction and ultimately source amnesia, will have much greater difficulty finishing this task successfully through method of strategy.
[28] The Verbal fluency test can assess for damage in the prefrontal lobes, which has been associated with patients who have source amnesia.
Patients with frontal lobe disorder have trouble putting verbal items into a proper sequential order, monitor personal behaviors as well as a deficient judgment in recency.
The severity of the damage to the prefrontal lobes directly correlates to the speed of which an individual can complete the Stroop Color-Naming Task.
Prevention of source amnesia in older adults may include memory training programs in an attempt to increase cortical thickness in the brain.
These memory-training programs involved serial memory recall practice using mental imagery as a mnemonic device.
[36] While this research has not been tested in a longitudinal study, it suggests that older adults and perhaps other at-risk groups for source amnesia could benefit from explicit memory training exercises.
Another way in which older adults can avoid source amnesia is to think about the relationship between the content and context of an experience or memory.
[33] This preventative measure must be taken when information is being encoded in order to direct attention to the source and to be aware of how it relates to the content.
[33] Eyewitness testimonies are an integral aspect in the criminal court system as judges and juries depend on them as evidence to determine a verdict.
[38][39] This causes grave legal implications given that it can result in wrongful convictions; therefore, it is important that interrogation practices are carefully carried out.
[27] Studies have shown that subjects are unable to remember anything that occurred during hypnosis and when asked how they acquired the knowledge to answer the questions, they tended to rationalize their incapability to indicate how they learned it.
This has seen to occur in the music industry and has the implication of copyright infringement over songs, as well as in the formation of scientific research ideas.
