Use of text stimuli normalizes reality monitoring in schizophrenics

Reality monitoring performance was assessed in normal, manic, and schizophrenic subjects, with self-generated text as the stimuli. The subjects were asked to mentally plan or orally generate stories and then to identify the origin of the information that they had planned or generated. The subjects were also exposed to irrelevant, distracting story material while performing the task. The performance of all subjects was appreciably better than performance in other studies in which word-list reality monitoring was used, and distraction had no deleterious effect on performance. These results are discussed in terms of their implications for intentional versus unintentional encoding processes in schizophrenics.