Depression, high stress levels and damage to relevant brain areas are examples of factors that can cause such disruption and hence source-monitoring errors.
Source-monitoring relies heavily on the individual's activated memory records; if anything prevents encoding the contextual details of an event while it happens, relevant information will not be fully retrieved and errors will occur.
[3] Heuristic judgements are made quickly without the conscious awareness of the individual, making use of perceptual, contextual, and other event-related information.
[1] This type of source-monitoring focuses on discriminating between externally retrieved sources, such as events happening in the world surrounding the individual.
[8] In older adults, the more detailed events do not help reduce these autobiographical reality-monitoring errors, possibly due to limits in processing resources.
[1] There are many processes that occur in the frontal regions that are important for source-monitoring; these include circuits linked with the hippocampus that encourage feature binding and structures that play a role in strategic retrieval.
[9] Processes which promote the binding or clustering of features, both physically and cognitively during encoding and retrieval, are important to source memory.
[12] However, older adults do not always exhibit source-monitoring errors, such as when encoded material are visually distinctive as is the case with pictures compared to words.
[13] Older adults appear to be unable to expend additional neural resources in the prefrontal cortex in conditions associated with greater demands, thus increasing source-monitoring errors for non-distinctive materials.
When a memory is known, the experience cannot be relived but individuals feel a sense of familiarity, often leading to confident (mis)attribution to a likely source.
[16] The Deese–Roediger–McDermott paradigm, or DRM paradigm, is a cognitive psychological procedure to study false memory in humans, wherein a list of related words (e.g. bed, rest, awake, tired, dream, wake, snooze, blanket, doze, slumber, snore, nap, peace, yawn, drowsy) is presented to a participant.
[18] There have been studies linking individuals who believe in false, abnormal life events (like memories from past lives) to an increased proneness to source-monitoring errors.
Specifically, these individuals demonstrate more errors in the false fame task than people who do not have such fabricated memories of abnormal life events.
[19] Cryptomnesia is unintentional plagiarism occurring when a person produces something believing that it was self-generated, when it was actually generated earlier, either internally or by an external source.