and imagination. Source monitoring theory postulates that memory errors occur when perceptual information is incorrectly attributed as being the source of a past experience. This may take place because one event shares the characteristics of another source. When a person has many sources of perceptual information about an event, their brain is easily able to evoke a memory of that event, even if they did not experience it, thus creating a misattributed memory. In one particular case of source confusion, a female rape survivor falsely accused a memory doctor of being her rapist. In this case, the doctor had made a television appearance seen by the female survivor prior to her attack. The woman misattributed the doctor's face with that of her attacker. An additional example of source confusion involves Ronald Reagan. In this instance, Ronald Reagan tells a story about a heroic pilot to whom he personally awarded a medal. However, he was actually recalling the story line from a theatrical production entitled "Wing and a Prayer". However, he strongly believed that he was involved in the medal process to this war hero. Causes Cognitive causes Causes of cryptomnesia Cryptomnesia is a source-monitoring error in which people often have difficulty determining whether a concept was internally generated or experienced externally. People occasionally misattribute the creation of a novel thought or idea as their own, when in fact they are retrieving it from a previous experience. Some individuals fail to establish memories with enough detail to generate a source attribution, causing a misattribution of memory to the wrong source. People often truly believe that the information they plagiarized was actually that of their own. Unintentional plagiarism is greater for information generated by others than ourselves. Researchers believe this may due to having better memory and associations for words we generate, as self-generated information is better remembered later. Moreover, cryptomnesia increases when information is generated by others before a self-generated idea. This may be due to the likelihood that people were thinking of their next response, rather than processing the source of the information. Causes of false memories False recognition can occur as the result of making an implicit associative response, an automatic association between two concepts in memory. It is believed that associative responses never come to conscious attention, thus the activation of the concept is assumed to be implicit. An implicit associative response has shown to arise when seeing