ABSTRACT
There is a wealth of research investigating how we remember events or experiences that have physically occurred. There is also evidence to suggest that the different ways in which a person views or thinks about an experience alters their memory of it, such as whether it was an important, typical, or emotional experience. Yet relatively little is known about how we remember such views or thoughts, largely because it is very dif®cult to study. We know that it is very important to remember thoughts as well as external events and experiences; it is necessary to have knowledge of what has happened and whether it was real or imagined. So, the research in this area has tended to focus on ``reality monitoring''; the checking of whether something that happened was internal, such as a thought, or external. This theory was devised by Marcia Johnson and her colleagues, and is the focus of this chapter. Source monitoring is an extension of the reality-monitoring framework and refers to the process of identifying the source of a memory.
