Source Monitoring

What it is

Johnson, Hashtroudi and Lindsay reviewed a framework in which deciding whether something was seen, heard, told or imagined rests on qualities of the experience, such as perceptual detail and the thoughts that went with it. The judgement uses flexible criteria, so errors follow, including familiarity credited to the wrong source and fiction folded into fact.

In effect

In the article on how false memories form, it explains why an imagined or suggested detail can later pass as something experienced.

What it does not say

It describes how source judgements are made and how they fail. It does not say that most memories are misattributed.

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