Source-monitoring framework
Also known as: Source monitoring
How the mind decides where a given memory came from.
What it means
The source-monitoring framework holds that memories carry no inherent label of their origin; instead, people attribute a source by evaluating the qualitative characteristics of the recollection — its perceptual vividness, contextual detail, and the cognitive operations it evokes — against learned criteria. Decisions are typically rapid and heuristic but can become deliberate when stakes are high. When a memory's features are ambiguous or misleading, attribution errors arise, producing source confusion, false memories, and reality-monitoring failures. The framework unified disparate findings on misattribution under a single decision-making account and connects memory to metacognition. It clarifies that 'remembering wrongly' is often a problem of source attribution rather than of content storage.
Examples
Deciding whether you actually locked the door or merely pictured doing it is a source-monitoring judgment.
Was last night's blazing argument real or a dream? You judge from how much perceptual detail it carries and whether it fits with everything else that happened that day.
You cannot tell whether you told your colleague the deadline moved or only drafted the message in your head — composing it feels much like sending it.
First described in Johnson, Hashtroudi & Lindsay (1993).