What is the relationship between our perceptions, memories, knowledge, beliefs, and expectations, on one hand, and reality, on the other? Studies of individual cognition show that distortions may occur as a by-product of normal reality-monitoring processes. Characterizing the conditions that increase and decrease such distortions has implications for understanding, for example, the nature of autobiographical memory, the potential suggestibility of child and adult eyewitnesses, and recent controversies about the recovery of repressed memories. Confabulations and delusions associated with brain damage, along with data from neuroimaging studies, indicate that the frontal regions of the brain are critical in normal reality monitoring. The author argues that reality monitoring is fundamental not only to individual cognition but also to social/cultural cognition. Social/cultural reality monitoring depends on institutions, such as the press and the courts, that function as our cultural frontal lobes. Where does normal social/cultural error in reality monitoring end and social/cultural pathology begin?
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