Reality Monitoring in Large Language Models: Self-Knowledge That Transforms with Conversation Memory

A conversational AI that cannot tell its own output from what a user said will treat its own mistakes as user-provided facts. In humans, this capacity is called reality monitoring, and its failures are linked to hallucinations, delusions, and confabulation, yet whether LLMs possess it remains untested. Here we show, across two experiments and six LLMs, that source attribution depends on how con…