Source monitoring refers to cognitive processes involved in making attributions about the origins of mental experiences; for example, attributing a mental experience to something dreamed, something imagined, or a perceived event. The concept of source memory overlaps with, but is more general than, the idea of memory for context. Source monitoring is an important aspect of everyday cognition, for example, in deciding whether one took one's medication or just thought about taking it, read about a space alien invasion in a tabloid or a news magazine, or really saw the defendant at the crime scene with a knife or just heard about the knife later. Errors in source monitoring range from the trivial (telling a joke to the same person you heard it from) to the egregious (mistaking a memory of a dream of being sexually abused for a memory of a real event from childhood...