Metacognitive Aspects of Source Monitoring

Source monitoring involves attributing remembered information to a source, such as determining who told you something. Source-monitoring is a highly inferential process, involving the evaluation of memory for contextual features but also drawing onto more general knowledge and beliefs (Johnson, Hashtroudi, and Lindsay, 1993). After an introduction to the typical laboratory paradigm of source monitoring and the measurement of the cognitive states involved through multinomial modeling, we review research on metacognitive influences on this inferential source-monitoring process. We also consider means of metacognitive control over source encoding through encoding strategies. Moving on to metacognitive monitoring processes, we review research on predictions of later source memory (judgments of source) and on the monitoring of source-attribution accuracy at test. The chapter concludes with questions for future research.