Reality monitoring
Telling apart memories of real events from memories of imagined ones.
What it means
Reality monitoring is the specific source-monitoring task of distinguishing memories derived from external perception from those generated internally through imagination or thought. The standard account holds that perceived events leave traces richer in sensory and contextual detail, while imagined events carry more traces of the cognitive effort used to construct them, and people use these qualitative differences as a guide. When an imagined event is vivid and elaborated — or repeatedly rehearsed — its features can come to resemble those of a perceived one, blurring the boundary and seeding false memories. The process is central to understanding hallucinations, confabulation, and the imagination-inflation effect. It also underlies everyday uncertainties about whether one did something or only intended to.
Examples
Wondering whether you really sent the email or just vividly imagined sending it is a reality-monitoring problem.
You stand on the doorstep genuinely unsure whether you locked up or only pictured locking up, because rehearsing the action leaves a trace that looks much like having done it.
A witness asked again and again to imagine how the intruder might have climbed in later recalls seeing him climb in: the imagined scene has acquired the detail of a perceived one.
First described in Marcia Johnson & Carol Raye (1981).