Source Monitoring Error

A source monitoring error occurs when a person correctly remembers a piece of information but incorrectly attributes it to the wrong source, for example recalling a fact accurately but mistakenly believing it came from television when it was actually learned from a friend. The psychologists Marcia Johnson, Shahin Hashtroudi and D. Stephen Lindsay formalized the source monitoring framework underlying this idea in an influential 1993 paper, proposing that memories do not arrive pre-labeled with their true origin; instead, a person actively judges where a memory came from using either fast, automatic heuristic judgments based on contextual cues, or slower, more deliberate systematic judgments requiring conscious effort, and errors can arise either from an original failure to encode enough information about the source in the first place or from a later breakdown in this judgment process. Researchers distinguish three broad categories of source monitoring: external source monitoring, which involves telling apart two different external events or sources; internal source monitoring, which involves distinguishing an actual spoken statement from a thought a person only had internally; and reality monitoring, which involves distinguishing memories of real events from memories of things a person only imagined. These errors occur to some degree in everyone, but are especially common among elderly people, young children, patients with amnesia, and people with schizophrenia, and they underlie a range of related false-memory phenomena, including cryptomnesia, in which a person unknowingly reproduces someone else's idea or words as their own original thought.