Consciousness and Cognition 20 (2011) 688695

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Consciousness and Cognition

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/concog

Sense of agency over thought: External misattribution of thought

in a memory task and proneness to auditory hallucination
Eriko Sugimori , Tomohisa Asai, Yoshihiko Tanno
Department of Cognitive and Behavioral Science, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo (Tanno Laboratory), 3-8-1 Komaba,
Meguro-ku, Tokyo 153-8902, Japan

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history:
Received 10 May 2010
Available online 5 February 2011
Keywords:
Auditory hallucination-like experience
DRM paradigm
Schizophrenia
Sense of passivity
Thought insertion
Sense of agency
Schizotypal personality
Memory

a b s t r a c t
Previous studies have suggested that auditory hallucination is closely related to thought
insertion. In this study, we investigated the relationship between the external misattribution of thought and auditory hallucination-like experiences. We used the AHES-17, which
measures auditory hallucination-like experiences in normal, healthy people, and the
DeeseRoedigerMcDermott paradigm, in which false alarms of critical lure are regarded
as spontaneous external misattribution of thought. We found that critical lures elicited
increased the number of false alarms as AHES-17 scores increased and that scores of
AHES-17 predicted the rate of false memory of critical lures. Furthermore, we revealed that
the relationship between AHES-17 scores and the rates of false alarms to critical lures was
strictly linear. Therefore, it might be said that individual differences in auditory hallucination-like experiences are highly related to the external misattribution of thought. We discussed these results from the perspective of the sense of agency over thought.
2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
Schizophrenia is a syndrome of mental disorders characterized by disintegration in the thinking process and emotional
responsiveness. Crow (1980) distinguished schizophrenia into two kinds of symptoms (two factors theory: positive and negative symptoms) and suggested an approach to understanding the illness according to the positive and negative symptoms.
Thereafter, disorganization symptoms were added to these symptoms and a three-factors theory became widely accepted
(Liddle, 1987; Liddle & Barnes, 1990). The term positive symptoms refers to symptoms that most individuals do not normally experience but that are present in schizophrenia, including delusions, auditory hallucinations, and thought disorder.
Positive symptoms are regarded as the core symptoms in schizophrenia (DSM-IV-TR; APA, 2000).
Frith (1987) predicted that by nature, normal people might have an ability to monitor their own actions or thoughts and
that positive symptoms might be due to a disorder of self-monitoring (self-monitoring theory). Thereafter, Frith, Blakemore,
and Wolpert (2000) introduced the computational model of motor control, which is an information processing model regarding body movements (Wolpert, Ghahramani, & Jordan, 1995), in order to explain the self-monitoring theory. The selfmonitoring theory has been regarded as a contribution to cognitive neuropsychology and has become widespread. The term
self-monitoring in self-monitoring theory is equivalent to the sense of agency in the motor control theory, which refers
to the feeling of causing ones own actions (Frith, 2005; Gallagher, 2000). Positive symptoms that are interpreted as being a
result of self-monitoring disorder, or a disorder in the sense of agency, might include experiences such as delusions of

Corresponding author. Fax: +81 3 5454 6979.

E-mail address: sugimori@beck.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp (E. Sugimori).
1053-8100/$ - see front matter 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.concog.2010.12.014

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control, auditory hallucinations, and thought insertions (Frith et al., 2000; Gallagher, 2004; Lindner, Their, Kircher,
Haarmeier, & Leube, 2005).
From the perspective of sense of agency, auditory hallucinations (I am hearing someone speaking ill of me) might be
caused by the external misattribution of ones own speech if the sense of agency over speech is decient. Delusions of control
(someone is controlling my body) might be caused by the external misattribution of ones own actions if the sense of
agency over body movement is decient, and thought insertion (someones thought is entering my mind) might be caused
by the external misattribution of ones own thoughts if the sense of agency over thought is decient (Asai, Sugimori, & Tanno,
2008). These three symptoms can be regarded as passivity phenomena.
These three passivity phenomena might be inseparable because speech can be regarded as a kind of body movement or
action, inner speech can be regarded as thought, and as suggested by Jones and Fernyhough (2007), by citing Vygotskians
(1966) developmental perspective on inner speech, thought and inner speech can be regarded as action. As for the relationship between thought insertion and auditory hallucination, Keefe, Arnold, Bayen, McEvoy, and Wilson (2002) experimentally
showed that both schizophrenic patients with auditory hallucinations and schizophrenic patients with thought insertion
were more likely to recognize words they generated as words they externally perceived. Morrison, Haddock, and Tarrier
(1995) suggested that auditory verbal hallucinations are one form of thought insertion. Sommer, Diederen, Selten, and Blom
(2010) proposed a theoretical framework in which auditory verbal hallucinations have two essential components: audibility
and alienation. According to Sommer et al.s framework, when alienation is not accompanied by audibility, it will result in
the experience of thought insertion. From this previous research, it can be said that the component of thought insertion
includes auditory hallucination in schizophrenia. In this study, we investigated whether the external misattribution of
thought can be observed in people who experience auditory hallucinations.
Previous experimental studies on speech demonstrated that those with schizophrenia suffer from a disordered sense of
agency. For example, the research on the experience of ones own speech has shown that people with schizophrenia were
more likely than normal healthy people to regard their own voice as belonging to someone else when feedback of their
own voice was altered on-line in an on-line self-monitoring task (e.g., Johns, Gregg, Allen, Vythelingum, & McGuire,
2006). In these previous studies on speech, participants spoke aloud words that the experimenter presented on a PC screen.
That is, participants spoke as they were required to. The factor of thought was overlooked, because it is difcult to directly
investigate this factor in the sense of agency by using an on-line self-monitoring task (Are you thinking about something by
yourself or is someone making you think about something?).
Memory tasks should be useful for investigating the sense of agency over thought. That is, the memory I was thinking
about that at that time can serve as a potential indicator of sense of agency over thought (I am thinking about that now)
because contemporaneous judgments about the origins of thoughts are difcult to measure. Daprati, Nico, Franck, and Sirigu
(2003) proposed a link between memory and the sense of agency on the basis of experiments investigating the effect of
agency on both explicit and implicit memory traces (Daprati, Nico, Saimpont, Franck, & Sirigu, 2005; Franck et al., 2000).
Furthermore, in order to directly demonstrate the relationship between sense of agency (on-line-sense of enactment) and
recalled judgment about enactment (the judgment of I did it), we previously focused on speech (Sugimori, Asai, & Tanno,
2010). Through our experiments, we demonstrated the probability that memory judgment of enactment might be based on
the on-line sense of enactment for the rst time. The memory judgment of enactment might be called agency memory, in
that this judgment might be based on the on-line sense of enactment (see the agency memory model: Fig. 1).
Of the many kinds of memory tasks, the DeeseRoedigerMcDermott paradigm (DRM paradigm; Deese, 1959; Roediger &
McDermott, 1995) is a preferred method for investigating the external misattribution of thought that participants spontaneously generate. In this paradigm, participants are presented with a series of words (e.g., hill, climb, valley, summit, top, molehill,
peak, plain, glacier, goat, bike, climber, range, steep) that are strongly associated with an unidentied target item, which is called

Fig. 1. The agency memory model.

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E. Sugimori et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 20 (2011) 688695

the critical lure (e.g., mountain). Roediger and McDermott (1995) and others (e.g., Deese, 1959) have found that normal healthy
controls often falsely recall or recognize the critical lure in subsequent testing and that such false memories are often associated
with high levels of condence. Recently, the dual-process activation-monitoring framework has been developed to specically
explain semantic-related false memories that occur in the DRM paradigm (McDermott & Watson, 2001). According to this theory, when list items are viewed during encoding or retrieval, the critical non-presented associate (critical lure) can be activated
and made more easily accessible through spreading activation in the semantic network. Then, when participants are asked
whether the word was viewed, they must make specic attributions about the source of activations. As a result, false memories
might occur when a subject does not correctly realize that he or she has internally generated the word during both encoding and
retrieval. That is, it can be said that false memory of critical lures might occur when people dont have a sense of agency over
their thoughts. Therefore, it can be predicted that people who are less likely to have a sense of agency over thought might be
more likely to misattribute something theyve internally generated to an external source.
Research on schizotypal personality disorder in the general population may provide a particularly good opportunity for
studying the biological and cognitive markers of vulnerability to schizophrenia in the absence of the confounding effects of
long-term hospitalization, medication, and severe psychotic symptoms (Raine & Lencz, 1995). Although schizophrenia is a
relatively rare disorder, epidemiological research has conrmed the high incidence (between 10% and 25%) of seemingly positive symptoms in the general population (see Freeman, 2006, for a review). Individuals who obtain high scores on schizotypal scales resemble patients with schizophrenia with respect to experimental correlates such as reasoning biases (Linney,
Peters, & Ayton, 1998; Van Dael et al., 2006) and information and language processing (Nunn & Peters, 2001; Peters, Pickering, & Hemsley, 1994), supporting the notion that psychometric schizotypy represents a dimensional trait that ranges from
normal to clinically psychotic (Strauss, 1969). The continuum view of psychosis proposes that psychotic symptoms are the
severe expression of schizotypal traits that are normally distributed in the general population. Investigating individual differences in normal, healthy people has merit, because differences in performance on an experimental task between people
with schizophrenia and normal, healthy people might not be because of the specic factor causing schizophrenia. Instead, it
could be because of the deterioration in general cognitive functioning resulting from the onset of schizophrenia when schizophrenic patients participated in the experiment (Vollema, 1999).
2. Study
We proceeded to investigate the external misattribution of thoughts in the people with auditory hallucination-proneness
by using the DRM. In order to measure auditory hallucination-proneness, we used the brief version of the Auditory Hallucination Experience Scale (AHES-17) (Asai, Sugimori, & Tanno, in press). Furthermore, we used two other questionnaires related to positive symptoms in schizophrenia: The Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire-Brief (SPQ-B; Raine & Benishay,
1995) and the LaunaySlade Hallucination Scale (LSHS; Bentall, Claridge, & Slade, 1989; Launay & Slade, 1981.) SPQ-B measures schizotypal personality disorder, including cognitive (positive), interpersonal (negative), and disorganized (disorganization) factors, according to the three-factor structure in schizophrenia. The LSHS measures general hallucination-like
experiences, including optical illusion and auditory illusion. That is, the factors measured by AHES-17 are included in
SPQ-B (in the cognitive factor) and LSHS.
2.1. Method
2.1.1. AHES-17
Sugimori, Asai, and Tanno (2009) developed the Auditory Hallucination-like Experience Scale (AHES), which consists of 40
items and measures auditory hallucination-like experiences. To reduce the burden on participants and to facilitate the measures global use as a self-report screening instrument for auditory hallucination-like experiences, the brief version of Auditory Hallucination Experience Scale (AHES-17) was developed (Asai et al., in press). The AHES-17 is a 17-item self-report
questionnaire with responses based on a ve-point Likert scale (15) (e.g., I heard someones voice, but nobody was actually
around.) Testretest reliability (r = .78, p < .0001) and internal reliability (a = .84) were adequate, and investigation of criterion related validity showed that the AHES-17 was highly correlated with scales measuring positive symptoms of schizophrenia, including auditory hallucinations. Furthermore, we initially reconrmed the reliability and factor structure of these
instruments in a large sample (379 men, 234 women; mean age of 19.23, SD = .98). (See Supplementary data.).
2.1.2. LSHS
The LaunaySlade Hallucination Scale (Bentall et al., 1989; Launay & Slade, 1981) is a 12-item self-report questionnaire
based on a ve-point Likert scale (15) (e.g., On occasion, I have seen a persons face in front of me when no one was in fact
there.). The LSHS measures hallucination-like experiences, including auditory hallucinations, but does not focus on auditory
hallucinations separately.
2.1.3. SPQ-B
The Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire-Brief (Raine & Benishay, 1995) is a 22-item, true/false self-report questionnaire consisting of items selected from the SPQ, and a 74-item self-report scale modeled on the Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual, Third Edition, Revised (DSM-III-R; APA, 1987) criteria for schizotypal personality disorder. The SPQ-B has the same

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691

three-factor structure as does the SPQ (e.g., Have you ever noticed a common event or object that seemed to be a special
sign for you? Have you found that it is best not to let other people know too much about you? and I nd it hard to communicate clearly what I want to say to people. These items measure cognitive, interpersonal, and disorganized factors,
respectively).
2.1.4. Materials for DRM paradigm
We used 15-word Japanese lists that are highly likely to induce false memories of critical non-presented words within the
context of the DRM paradigm (Miyaji & Yama, 2002; Roediger & McDermott, 1995). We used six lists of 15 words that induce
high rates of false memories and added ve unrelated words to each list (thus, 15 associated words and ve non-associated
words appeared on each list). Ten of the 15 words on each list were used as learned items and the remaining ve words (critical lures) as well as the ve non-associated words (non-critical lures) were used as distractors. Non-associated words (ve
words for each list for a total of 30 words) were selected from the lists not used in the learning phase and not associated with
the lists used in the learning phase. That is, 10 learned words, ve critical lures, and ve non-critical lures were used in each
trial.
2.2. Participants
We conducted the research in a group format including 172 undergraduates (52 men, 120 women; mean age of 19.61,
SD = .98) as a course requirement in a psychology of learning class. The 172 undergraduates were seated in every other seat,
like during an examination, in order to prevent them from seeing what the person next to them is writing.
2.3. Procedure
Six trials of learning, ller-task, and oldnew recognition phases were conducted. Participants were given a booklet containing math questions for the six ller-tasks and six word lists for the oldnew recognition test.
During the learning phase, participants were told that several words would be read aloud one at a time by an experimenter. A microphone was used to amplify the experimenters voice. Before the experiment began, it was conrmed that
all the participants could hear the experimenter voice. They were asked to try to remember as many words as possible.
The interval between the words was 2.0 s. After 10 words were read aloud, participants were asked to perform a ller-task
(solving math questions on paper) for 1.5 min. They were instructed to solve as many questions as possible and were then
asked to turn the page to begin the test. The test involved presentation of a list of 20 words; participants were asked to indicate whether each word had been learned. The test was 2 min in duration. After 2 min, the experimenter conrmed that the
participants had nished lling out the oldnew recognition test format for 20 items. The learning phase for the next list was
then conducted. These learning, ller-task, and test phases were conducted for all six lists.
After the experiment, participants were given a booklet including the SPQ-B, LSHS, and AHES-17 and asked to complete all
questions. The participants could take as much time much as they needed to ll out the questionnaires.
2.3.1. Analysis
After conrming that the false alarms of critical lures could actually be seen in this study, we investigated whether
auditory hallucination is closely related to thought insertion from three aspects. First, we compared the correlation between the rate of false lures and the score of AHES-17 (auditory hallucination-like experiences) and that between the rate
of false lures and the scores of the SPQ-B (schizotypal personality disorder) and LSHS (hallucination-like experiences), in
order to demonstrate that auditory hallucination-like experiences were highly related to external misattribution of
thought compared to experiences more inclusively related to schizotypy. Second, we conducted a linear multiple regression analysis in order to investigate how well each questionnaire score predicted the degree of external misattribution of
thought. If thought insertion were highly related to the factor of auditory hallucination, no other questionnaire score
would predict the rate of false alarms of critical lures after the factor of auditory hallucination-like experience was excluded by the forced entry method.
Third, after conrming the signicant relationship between AHES-17 scores and the rates of false alarms by the analyses
mentioned above, we further investigated the extent to which the relationship between AHES-17 scores and the rates of false
alarms to critical lures was strictly linear or whether some evidence of nonlinearity also emerged. A nonlinear relationship
between a schizotypy index (AHES-17) and an outcome variable of interest, such as the rates of false alarms for critical lures,
could be construed as evidence consistent with the existence of a latent taxon or, alternatively, a rather steep threshold function on an underlying quantitative metric (Lenzenweger & Maher, 2002). We parsed our sample into quartiles for the AHES17: participants with AHES-17 scores lower than the mean 1 SD (Quartile 1, N = 29), those with AHES-17 scores ranging
from the mean 1 SD to the mean (Quartile 2, N = 50), those with AHES-17 scores ranging from the mean to the mean
+1 SD (Quartile 3, N = 64), and those with AHES-17 scores higher than the mean + 1SD (Quartile 4, N = 29). If a sharp ascent
between neighboring quartiles exists, the relationships among all quartiles may be nonlinear and only particular quartiles
may affect the increase in the false alarm rate, suggesting evidence of a taxon. On the other hand, no signicant differences
between adjacent quartiles and a gentle, linear relationship slope may be evidence of a quantitative metric (Lenzenweger &
Maher, 2002).

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E. Sugimori et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 20 (2011) 688695

Table 1
Intercorrelations of questionnaires and rates of hits and FAs for non-critical lure, and FAs for critical liters in the DRM paradigm.
Index

l. AHES-17

Hit
FA (non-critical hues)
FA (critic allures)

2. LSHS

.04
.05
.33*

SPQ-B

.03
.01
.22*

3. All

4. Cog

.01
.01
.05

.07
.05
.10

5.Dis
.05
.01
.02

6. Int
.03
.05
.01

Cog = cognitive, Dis = disorganized, and Int = interpersonal factors respectively.

p < .0 l.

Table 2
Simultaneous regression analysis of rates of FAs for critical lures in relation to the AHES-17, LSHS, and cognitive factor in the SPQ-B.
Variable
AHES-17
LSHS
SPQ-B

S EB
.004
.000
.002
.001
.001

Cog
Dis
Int

b
.001
.002
.005
.003
.005

p
.37
.03
.04
.04
.02

3.34
.23
.44
.57
.21

.00*
.82
.66
.57
.84

Cog = cognitive. Dis = disorgnaized and Int = interpersonal factors respectively.

p < .01.

Fig. 2. False alarms for critical lures for each quartile in AHES-17.

3. Results
3.1. Mean rates of hits and false alarms
The mean hit rate (i.e., the rate at which learned words were correctly identied as learned) was .96 (SD = .01), the mean
rate of false alarms (i.e., the rate at which unlearned words were incorrectly identied as learned) in response to the critical
non-presented words was .42 (SD = .01), and the mean rate of false alarms in response to the non-critical non-presented
words was .01 (SD = .00).
3.2. Correlations between the questionnaires and the DRM paradigm (Table 1)
The highest Pearsons correlation was found between false alarms for critical non-presented words and scores on the
AHES-17 (r = .33), followed by that between false alarms for critical non-presented words and scores on the LSHS
(r = .22); nally, the correlation between false alarms for critical non-presented words and scores on the cognitive factor
of the SPQ-B (positive symptoms of schizotypy) was lower than was the correlation between critical non-presented words
and scores on the AHES-17 and LSHS (r = .10).
3.3. Linear multiple regression analysis (Table 2)
Using linear multiple regression analysis, we examined how each questionnaire (AHES-17, LSHS, cognitive factor of the
SPQ-B) predicted the false alarm rates associated with critical lures. We used a simultaneous regression procedure with

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693

forced entry of the schizotypy measures in the prediction of the false alarm rates for critical lures. The only signicant contribution to the explanation of the false alarm rates for critical lures was made by the AHES-17 scale.
3.4. Nature of the relationships between the AHES-17 and the false alarms for critical lures
We examined the rates of false alarms for critical lures in relation to the parsing (Fig. 2). We conducted an ANOVA on the
proportion of false alarms for critical lures for each quartile, revealing a main effect [F(1, 30) = 16.82, MSE = .01, p < .01].
Tukeys post hoc tests conrmed that the rates of FAs were higher in Quartiles 3 and 4 than in Quartile 1, and that the rate
of false alarms was higher in Quartile 4 than in Quartile 2. Because we found no signicant differences between adjacent
quartiles, it can be said that a relatively at plot or gentle ascent across all quartiles was obtained, lending further support
to the fully dimensional model.
4. Discussion
This study used a memory task to investigate the relationship between external misattribution of thought and auditory
hallucination-like experiences. We used the DeeseRoedigerMcDermott (DRM) paradigm to induce spontaneous thought of
words semantically associated with presented words, and the brief version of the Auditory Hallucination Experience Scale
(AHES-17) to measure auditory hallucination-like experiences. We also used two other questionnaires, the LaunaySlade
Hallucination Scale (LSHS) and the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire-Brief (SPQ-B), in which the factor auditory hallucination-like experiences is included, to demonstrate that external misattribution of thought was related to auditory hallucination-like experiences closest among all experiences in schizotypy. The rate of false alarms of critical lure was
higher in AHES-17 than in LSHS, and higher in LSHS than in SPQ-B, which suggests that auditory hallucination-like experience was most related to external misattribution of thought in the positive symptom experiences of schizophrenia. Furthermore, we showed that the false alarm rate for critical lures was predicted only by scores on the AHES-17 and not by those on
the LSHS or on the cognitive factor of the SPQ-B after excluding the factor of AHES-17 from these two questionnaires. Therefore, it can be said that in all hallucination-like experiences, only the factor of auditory hallucination-like experiences might
be related to thought insertion, although the correlation between the score of LSHS and the rate of false alarms of critical
lures was signicant (r = .22).
Laws and Bhatt (2005) used the DRM paradigm to investigate memory functioning in normal healthy subjects who were
divided according to their performances on a measure of delusional ideation (the PDI: Peters et al. Delusional Inventory;
Peters, Joseph, & Garety, 1999). They found that, compared to those obtaining low PDI scorers, high PDI participants recalled
signicantly fewer correct words and a greater number of critical lures. Their results are similar to ours. Auditory hallucinations and delusions are likely to coexist (Verdoux et al., 1998), and questions about auditory hallucinations related to paranoid ideation are included in the AHES-17 (e.g., You saw people laughing and felt they were laughing about you). Both of
two primary positive symptoms, both auditory hallucination-like experiences and delusional ideation, may be related to
external misattribution of thought. In future research, we should investigate the relationship among these two primary positive symptoms and the external misattribution of thought.
As for the task in which a picture accompanied by a word naming the picture is presented on a PC monitor (external
source), or only a word is presented on the monitor and participants are asked to imagine the picture (internal source), both
patients with schizophrenia and normal individuals prone to hallucinations have shown a tendency to misattribute stimuli
originating from internal sources to external sources (e.g., Henquet, Krabbendam, Dautzenberg, Jolles, & Merckelbach, 2005;
Lari, Van der Linden, & Marczewski, 2004; Rankin & OCarroll, 1995; Startup, Startup, & Sedgman, 2008; Woodward, Menon,
& Whitman, 2007). The external misattribution has also been seen in the task where participants were asked to speak or hear
the word (e.g., Brbion, Gorman, Amador, Malaspina, & Sharif, 2002; Brbion et al., 2000; Woodward et al., 2007) and where
participants were asked to generate (e.g., anagram; taelb) or hear the word (Keefe et al., 2002). While a tendency toward
external misattribution has been seen among people with schizophrenia when they are directly asked to think of something,
the rate of false alarms for critical lures (external misattribution of their thought) among those with schizophrenia was not
different from that among normal, healthy people when using the DRM paradigm (Elvevag, Fisher, Weickert, Weinberger, &
Goldberg, 2004; Lee, Iao, & Lin, 2007; Moritz, Woodward, Cuttler, Whitman, & Watson, 2004).
The DRM paradigm is an implicit method to investigate the external/internal source monitoring because participants are
not directly asked to imagine the pictures represented by particular words presented in the learning session. Rather, during
the learning session or the monitoring session, they unconsciously or automatically imagine words associated with the
words presented (McDermott & Watson, 2001; Peters et al., 2008). Taking into consideration the idea that general memory
impairment is a well-established correlate of schizophrenia (Aleman, Hijman, de Haan, & Kahn, 1999; Heinrichs & Zakzanis,
1998), it can be said that schizophrenia patients might have semantic decits. Items semantically associated with learned
items might not be activated in them, and as a result, they showed a decrease in the conscious recollection of both true
and false memories of critical words, and they showed an increase in the non-critical words, compared with normal people
(Huron & Danion, 2002). That is, these previous studies suggest that people with schizophrenia are less able to imagine
words semantically associated with presented words in the rst place; therefore, those with schizophrenia might produce
fewer correct recall and false alarms of critical lures than did normal, healthy people. By using only normal individuals in
this study, we found no differences between people prone and not prone to auditory hallucinations in terms of hits for

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learned items and false alarms for non-critical lures, and found differences only in the critical lures in false alarm. This result
suggests that we were able to successfully control the likelihood of semantic activation and were able to focus on the effect
of what is related to external misattribution of thought.
There have been two kinds of interpretation about the schizotypal personality: the full dimensional model and the quasidimensional model (Claridge, 1997; Claridge & Davis, 2003). According to the quasi-dimensional model (Meehl, 1962, 1990),
there are two types of continuity between normality and psychosis and these two types are discontinuous. If the quasidimensional model is valid, investigation of individual differences, as in this study, might not be signicant. On the other
hand, in the full dimensional model, schizotypy is regarded as a dimension of personality that is normally distributed
throughout the population. We revealed that the relationship between AHES-17 scores and the rates of false alarms to critical lures was strictly linear, and this result supported the full dimensional model. Therefore, it can be said that investigating
individual differences by using questionnaires might be an effective way to reveal the disorders in schizophrenia.
The phenomenon of thought insertion is to attribute what come to ones mind to some others thought. This phenomenon occurs on-line and might happen because of decits in sense of agency over thought (Frith, 2005; Gallagher, 2000).
Investigating on-line-external misattribution of thought (the disorder of sense of agency over thought) by experiment is difcult because whether one is thinking about something now or not should be dependent on ones introspection. By using a
memory task, the DRM paradigm, in this study, we treated critical lures of false memory as decits in the sense of agency
over thought, based on the agency memory theory (Sugimori et al., 2010). By extending the interpretation of external misattribution in the memory task to decits in the sense of agency, we could show the possibility that using a memory task is
useful for investigating the sense of agency, and we might also be able to bridge the perspective obtained by memory research with the perspective in general psychology.

Appendix A. Supplementary material

Supplementary data associated with this article can be found, in the on-line version, at doi:10.1016/j.concog.2010.12.014.
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