Imagination Inflation: Can Imagining Events Create False Memories?
Author: Angela Bogdanova · Published: October 12, 2026 · Editorial Policy
Research cluster: Memory & Forgetting · Written by Artificial Sapiens
Imagination inflation describes an experimentally observed change in autobiographical judgment: after imagining a possible past event, a person may become more confident that it happened. The phenomenon helps explain how internally generated scenes can influence a later appraisal of the past. It is most consistently demonstrated as a modest increase in belief about an event's occurrence; the creation of a vivid, confidently held false autobiographical memory is a separate and more demanding outcome.
The basic answer is yes: imagining an event can increase later belief that it occurred, and in some experiments imagination has also produced erroneous reports of remembering actions or episodes. The size and meaning of the effect depend on what participants imagine, the task used to measure change, plausibility, source information, and the distinction between belief and recollection. A systematic review of experimental studies and a 2025 registered report together illustrate both the reliability of the basic confidence shift and the limits of sweeping claims about manufactured memories.
What Is Imagination Inflation in Psychology?
Imagination inflation is the increase in a person's subjective belief or confidence that a past event occurred following an imagination exercise involving that event. In the classic autobiographical paradigm, adults rate how likely different childhood events were to have happened to them, imagine some initially unlikely events, and later provide another set of ratings. The critical comparison is the change for imagined events against the change for comparable events that were not imagined.
The term was established by Maryanne Garry, Charles Manning, Elizabeth Loftus, and Steven Sherman in a 1996 experiment. The idea subsequently expanded to studies in which people imagine carrying out simple actions and later misidentify those actions as performed. Both research traditions concern judgments about the origin of mental information, although their tasks, outcome measures, and implications differ.
A person can picture a birthday party that never happened, a routine errand that might have happened, or an action that was only planned. Each imagined episode can acquire details and familiarity. Whether that experience becomes an autobiographical belief, an apparent memory, or remains clearly labeled imagination is a separate empirical question.
A definition that separates the key outcomes
Researchers distinguish event plausibility, autobiographical belief, recollective experience, and confidence. Plausibility asks whether an event could realistically happen to someone in the relevant circumstances. Autobiographical belief asks whether the event happened to this particular person. Recollective experience concerns a subjective sense of remembering the episode, potentially with images, emotion, or a narrative. Confidence describes the strength of the person's judgment.
These dimensions can be related while still varying independently. Someone might consider an event plausible yet have no belief it happened personally. Another person may believe an event occurred on family testimony while possessing no personal recollection. A detailed mental image can exist while the person knows it is invented. The distinctions are supported by Scoboria and colleagues' work on plausibility and belief and are central to the Brewin and Andrews systematic review.
For this reason, a rise from a very low to a somewhat higher likelihood rating should be described as imagination inflation in autobiographical belief. It should not automatically be described as an implanted, complete false memory.
How the Classic Imagination Inflation Experiment Works
The original design used a Life Events Inventory: participants considered possible childhood experiences and rated their confidence that each had occurred. At a later session, they were instructed to imagine selected events that they had initially rated as relatively unlikely. They then returned to the inventory and judged the events again. Researchers compared the direction and size of confidence changes between imagined and nonimagined items.
The design matters because the result concerns within-person changes under controlled conditions. The imagination procedure generates a representation of a candidate event; a later judgment supplies the outcome. There is no direct access to the entirety of the participant's childhood, and a laboratory confidence rating is not identical to an independently verified autobiographical recollection.
The original Garry et al. study demonstrated that imagined childhood events could receive larger confidence increases than comparison items. The methodological insight was influential: an apparently benign cognitive operation could alter how an event's past occurrence was judged.
Why researchers compare imagined and nonimagined events
Initial selection of unlikely events introduces an important statistical concern. When items begin near the bottom of a rating scale, some upward movement is expected on retesting, even without a causal imagination effect. This is one form of regression toward the mean, and ordinary changes in interpretation or familiarity with the questionnaire can also influence ratings.
Controlled comparisons address this problem by tracking similarly selected events that were not imagined. In the 2017 systematic review, Brewin and Andrews examined this alternative alongside changes in confidence, event plausibility, and the possibility that imagination sometimes prompts retrieval of a true event. The reported advantage for imagined items generally persisted, though effect sizes were often small.
The correct inference concerns the difference between conditions. Merely observing that someone's second rating is higher than their first does not establish that imagination created a false memory.
What Does the Evidence Actually Show?
The most informative review located 16 studies with 19 datasets on childhood autobiographical imagination inflation. Of 17 datasets reporting valid tests of the main belief effect, 11 showed a statistically significant advantage for imagining over the relevant comparison condition, and six did not. In 13 of 14 datasets reporting suitable mean changes, the extra increase associated with imagination was no more than approximately one point on the seven- or eight-point rating scale. Group averages generally remained below the midpoint of the scale.
Those numbers come from Brewin and Andrews (2017). They support the conclusion that the procedure can shift belief while indicating that typical childhood-event ratings do not leap from near-disbelief to unwavering certainty. A minority of participants changed ratings on particular items, and individual effects varied across experiments.
The review also distinguished the outcomes of imagination inflation, false feedback, and more elaborate memory-implantation procedures. Combining percentages from those different paradigms into one claim about the probability of gaining a vivid false memory would obscure differences in suggestive information, corroboration, interview intensity, and scoring standards.
What counts as a false memory?
When an experiment records a higher judgment that an event occurred, that is an autobiographical-belief outcome. When it measures a subjective recollection, the evidence becomes more directly relevant to remembering. If participants provide detailed narratives and independent verification establishes that the event did not occur, a richer false-memory claim may be warranted.
The 2017 review found that some imagination studies measured recollective experience, but they often lacked enough information to determine how many participants experienced clear, complete false memories. This is a measurement limitation, not evidence that imagined experiences have no consequences.
A scientific account must preserve both conclusions: imagination can distort judgments and sometimes produce source-memory errors; the frequency of complete autobiographical false memories cannot be read directly from simple likelihood-rating studies.
Why Imagining an Event Can Make It Feel Real
Source monitoring: deciding where a mental image came from
Source monitoring refers to processes through which people judge the origins of remembered information. An image might originate in perception, a conversation, a dream, an imagined scenario, a photograph, or a previous attempt to remember. Such judgments use contextual, sensory, emotional, and cognitive-operation cues rather than a permanent label attached to each mental representation.
The source-monitoring framework developed by Johnson, Hashtroudi, and Lindsay offers a central explanation. Imagining an episode can produce a coherent scene that later contains qualities often associated with remembered experience. If the person does not retrieve, notice, or adequately weigh the fact that the details were generated during imagination, the scene may be misattributed to the past.
This account is a framework for source judgments, not a claim that the brain records imagination and perception as equivalent. Most people distinguish many invented scenes from experienced events successfully. Imagination inflation concerns circumstances in which that distinction becomes less reliable.
Familiarity and processing fluency
Imagined events become easier to think about simply because they have been processed. This accessibility can create familiarity, and familiarity can influence judgments of prior experience. People often treat a scene that comes to mind readily as one that may have happened, even when its accessibility derives from earlier visualization or discussion.
In an experiment comparing imagination with paraphrasing, Sharman, Garry, and Beuke (2004) found increasing confidence after exposure to fictitious autobiographical descriptions whether participants imagined or paraphrased them. Repeating the task beyond one exposure did not produce an additional effect in that design. The finding cautions against treating vivid imagery alone as the necessary cause: elaboration, familiarity, and exposure can also matter.
Fluency is therefore one plausible contributor within a broader set of mechanisms. The same pleasant feeling of recognition can arise from rehearsal, conversation, and previous reading.
Sensory detail, narrative coherence, and emotion
Imagery can enrich a scene with a location, sounds, anticipated feelings, and a sequence of actions. These details may affect how memory-like it seems. Yet sensory vividness is an imperfect indicator of historical truth: genuinely experienced events may be vague, while imagined events can be exceptionally detailed.
Imagery instructions differ across studies. Bays, Zabrucky, and Foley (2015) found an inflation effect under guided imagery instructions in their experiment, especially for negative events, while other imagery conditions did not produce the same pattern. It would be inaccurate to assume that any imaginative exercise, emotional tone, or descriptive richness produces identical outcomes.
These mechanisms help explain an everyday paradox: a person may correctly recognize a scene as imagined at one moment yet later remember its details while recalling less clearly how the scene originated.
Three Experimental Traditions That Must Be Kept Separate
1. Imagining possible childhood events
The classic autobiographical studies measure change in belief or subjective memory for personally possible experiences. They are useful for understanding assessments of distant events whose original details cannot routinely be verified. Their central methodological weakness is also clear: the actual occurrence status of every suggested event is often uncertain.
A control design and carefully chosen items reduce uncertainty, but an increase in belief can sometimes reflect recovering a genuine episode, changes in interpretation, or changing response criteria.
2. Imagining actions that were not performed
Action-memory experiments provide tighter control over whether participants actually performed, imagined, or merely heard statements about actions. In the Goff and Roediger (1998) experiments, subsequent repeated imagination led some participants to incorrectly remember having performed actions in an earlier experimental session.
This evidence is particularly strong for errors about a known source because the researchers controlled the original actions. It demonstrates false source attribution in a specific laboratory setting. Generalizing from short action statements to entire autobiographical histories requires additional evidence.
Related experiments found that even imagining another person performing an action could sometimes produce erroneous claims of one's own performance, with evidence of different mechanisms for self-imagination and other-imagination. See Lindner and Echterhoff (2015).
3. Suggestion-supported event implantation
A different research family presents fictitious autobiographical events with misleading testimony, manipulated photographs, repeated interviewing, or purported corroboration. These procedures can combine suggestion with imagery and social information. They answer a broader question about constructing autobiographical reports under sustained external influence.
The Brewin and Andrews review found higher rates of some reported recollective experience in memory-implantation paradigms than in ordinary imagination inflation studies, while drawing attention to much lower rates of experiences classified as full memories. Such rates depend on the scoring criteria and the procedures used. They are not probabilities that apply to ordinary daydreaming.
The distinction also protects the article's scope. Detailed coverage of general false memories belongs to the False Memories research overview; the present article examines the specific contribution of imagination.
Does the Event Have to Be Plausible?
Plausibility matters because a person evaluates imagined content against knowledge of the world and their own life. Pezdek, Blandon-Gitlin, and Gabbay (2006) found that imagining plausible childhood events increased occurrence ratings in their design, whereas imagining implausible events did not. Plausibility can constrain the effect even when imagination instructions are otherwise similar.
Other research complicates a simple plausibility threshold. Bays, Zabrucky, and Gagne (2012) reported increases in personal plausibility under elaborate imagery for low-prevalence events but found no evidence of imagination inflation or false-memory construction in their experiment. General plausibility, personal plausibility, belief, and recollection were different outcomes.
An implausible event becoming somewhat more imaginable is not the same as the person accepting that it happened. At the same time, implausibility does not make every memory error impossible. Research on suggested autobiographical events finds nonuniform relationships between plausibility and false belief, as reported by Scoboria and colleagues.
A practical example makes the distinction clear. An adult can picture having attended a school fair because fairs are common. A detailed scene might make the possibility feel familiar. That does not establish attendance. Records, independent contemporaneous evidence, and the remembered origin of the scene remain separate questions.
Does Repeated Imagination Make the Effect Stronger?
The answer depends on the experiment. Repeated imagination of simple actions produced increasing source errors in Goff and Roediger's action paradigm. In contrast, the autobiographical exposure study by Sharman, Garry, and Beuke reported no further increase beyond the first exposure when participants imagined or paraphrased fictitious event descriptions.
This difference reflects the fact that action-performance recognition and autobiographical likelihood ratings test partly different processes. The number of repetitions, the interval between sessions, the outcome scale, and the material all matter.
Claims such as "imagining something five times makes you remember it as true" are unsupported as a general psychological law. The studies establish condition-dependent changes rather than an everyday dose-response formula.
Can Imagination Change Belief Without Creating a Memory?
Yes. A person can become less sure that an event never happened, while still saying they have no memory of it. That is one of the most important conclusions of the systematic evidence. The first response to imagination may be a small shift in possibility, not an invented narrative.
A further complication is that belief and recollection can dissociate in the other direction: someone may experience vivid imagery of a supposed episode while doubting that it really occurred. Recollective vividness, autobiographical belief, and memory confidence should each be measured independently where possible. The 2017 review expressly recommends attention to how participants describe their own experiences rather than treating researchers' categories as interchangeable with self-reports.
Memory researchers therefore ask more than "Did the participant say yes?" They examine what question was asked, what answer options were offered, and how the reported experience changed.
How Recent Research Tests the Explanations
In a preregistered design published in 2025, Dudek and Polczyk studied 279 participants using a childhood-event imagination procedure. They investigated whether mistrust of one's memory predicted stronger imagination inflation, and whether experimentally induced doubt or cues drawing attention to the origin of a scene changed the result.
The study found a greater increase in occurrence ratings for imagined events than for nonimagined controls. In one principal comparison the reported mean changes were approximately 0.74 and 0.18 scale points, respectively. The findings support a modest belief-inflation effect in that sample.
The study did not confirm its predicted relationship between trait memory distrust and imagination inflation. The experimentally induced distrust also did not produce the hypothesized moderation across cue conditions. Additional analyses suggested that using two origin-related cues could reduce inflation in some conditions, but the pattern was dependent on experimental assignment. These results refine possible moderators rather than overturning the core phenomenon.
The 2025 study is valuable for its planned analyses and explicit tests of alternative explanations. It is one sample and one protocol, so its null results do not establish that all individual differences are irrelevant. The appropriate conclusion is that perceived memory unreliability cannot presently be treated as a simple universal predictor of imagination inflation.
What Are the Most Important Scientific Limitations?
The reality of an autobiographical event may be unknown
For a childhood event outside laboratory observation, researchers may lack independent records proving whether it happened. An increased occurrence rating can therefore represent a false belief, a recovered correct belief, a reinterpretation, or an uncertain judgment. Designs that use known-impossible events help, but each introduces its own assumptions and constraints.
Mazzoni and Memon (2003) studied a medical event that was not used in the participants' setting and reported effects on autobiographical beliefs and some memory reports. Subsequent reviews examine how to interpret these claims and the strength of the recorded recollections. Experimental control and detailed outcome reporting are essential.
Retesting can change ratings without imagery
Repeated questionnaires can increase familiarity and alter how people interpret a prompt. Selection of initially low-rated events can produce regression toward the mean. A controlled difference, rather than an uncontrolled before-after shift, is the appropriate test.
A rating scale is not a historical investigation
An eight-point likelihood scale provides a quantitative judgment at the moment of testing. It does not reveal whether a detailed episode was remembered, how strongly it was endorsed outside the study, or whether the participant would maintain the belief months or years later.
Studies differ in instructions and samples
Many foundational studies recruited university students or adults recalling hypothetical childhood events. Guided imagery, paraphrasing, repeated action simulation, and suggestion supported by other people's purported testimony differ markedly. Findings should be interpreted at the level of the actual tested paradigm. Cultural background, childhood experience, age, and the event's meaning may affect generalizability, but robust effect estimates for all those variations remain limited.
Mechanisms are tested indirectly
Evidence consistent with source-monitoring errors, familiarity, or fluent processing does not identify a unique neural pathway or establish that one process explains every instance. Brain-imaging descriptions should not be appended to a cognitive result as if they proved a mechanism that the experiment did not directly test.
How Is Imagination Inflation Different From Other Memory Effects?
Imagination inflation and the misinformation effect
The misinformation effect involves exposure to misleading information after an event and subsequent changes in reports or judgments about that event. Imagination inflation specifically uses mental simulation of a possible event as a manipulation. Both may involve source attribution, familiarity, and changing expectations. Their experimental setups, targets, and canonical search intents remain distinct.
For the wider eyewitness misinformation literature, see The Misinformation Effect in Eyewitness Memory.
Imagination inflation and reconstructive memory
Reconstructive remembering describes how prior knowledge, context, inference, and later information can shape a retrieved representation. Imagination inflation is a more specific experimentally studied example in which an imagination episode affects a later autobiographical judgment. It should be placed within the larger science of reconstruction without claiming to explain all memory change.
Imagination inflation and false feedback
False feedback uses externally supplied misleading information to make a suggested personal event seem likely. Imagination inflation can occur without false feedback. When researchers combine imagery and authoritative-sounding suggestions, it becomes harder to attribute observed changes to imagination alone.
Imagination inflation and ordinary visualization
Athletes, performers, therapists, and students use visualization for many legitimate purposes, including rehearsal and planning. Imagining a future action and later judging whether a past action occurred are different tasks. The existence of imagination inflation does not mean that every mental rehearsal is harmful or that visualization inevitably produces false autobiographical beliefs.
Everyday Examples: What Might the Effect Look Like?
Imagine someone repeatedly picturing a family trip based on a relative's description. Years later, they may find the scene familiar and need to ask whether they actually remember the trip or remember imagining it. The hypothetical example shows how the source of an image can become uncertain; it does not demonstrate that the person has a false memory.
Another case involves intending to send an email, vividly thinking through doing it, and later feeling as though the action was completed. Laboratory studies of performed versus imagined actions offer a plausible analogy. In daily life, however, forgetting, prospective-memory failure, routine habits, and ordinary uncertainty are additional explanations. Checking an actual sent-mail record is more informative than judging how vivid the remembered action feels.
A third example concerns a story heard repeatedly at family gatherings. Someone may develop a fluent narrative and an apparent visual perspective even though their knowledge originally came from other people. This is an illustration of source attribution, with imagination as one possible contributor among repetition and social transmission.
Examples are aids to understanding, not proof that a particular person's memory is false.
Imagination Inflation in Interviews, Therapy, and Legal Settings
Autobiographical memory questions can carry emotional, clinical, and legal significance. Repeatedly encouraging someone to imagine a specific unverified event, supplying details, or presenting a hypothesis as historical fact can influence later belief and report. The evidence supports care with suggestive methods when accuracy matters, especially if an interviewer has authority or a participant feels pressure to produce an account.
A neutral approach asks open-ended questions, distinguishes spontaneous recollections from material suggested during an interview, records the origin of details, and avoids rewarding an increasingly elaborate narrative. A recollection can feel subjectively real without proving an event occurred; equally, the possibility of memory error does not demonstrate that an allegation or a difficult memory is false.
The Brewin and Andrews review calls for attention to the difference between belief, recollection, and confidence when interpreting research in courtroom settings. General source-monitoring research also explains why mere intensity or certainty is insufficient for verifying a historical claim.
A clinician can explore distress, meanings, and present-day functioning without asserting that an imagined scene has been recovered as a verified event. Questions about trauma, dissociation, or a diagnosed condition belong to a clinical assessment conducted with appropriate professional care, not to an imagination-inflation self-test.
Are Some People More Susceptible Than Others?
Studies have examined imagery vividness, absorption, fantasy proneness, dissociative experiences, memory distrust, and other variables. Results have not supported a single dependable personality profile that predicts imagination inflation across tasks. Some studies report associations under particular procedures, while others fail to reproduce them.
The 2025 Dudek and Polczyk study found no support for its proposed moderation by several traits associated with disengagement from reality, and no simple trait-memory-distrust relationship with the main effect. Research on event valence and time period also shows contextual variation rather than a universal direction: Sharman and Barnier (2008) found the largest inflation for recent positive events in their particular design.
Neither a person's imagination, creativity, uncertainty, nor a questionnaire score identifies them as a reliable or unreliable eyewitness. Individual forensic or clinical conclusions require substantially more evidence than a group-level laboratory association.
Can Someone Reduce the Risk of Confusing Imagined and Real Events?
Research suggests that paying attention to the source of information can sometimes help. In Sharman, Garry, and Hunt (2005), participants given a combination of source and familiarity cues showed resistance to the effect under the study's conditions. The 2025 registered report found some cue-related reductions in particular experimental groups, with limits to generalization.
Where accurate recollection matters, it is reasonable to distinguish what was directly experienced, what was told by another person, what was inferred, and what was deliberately visualized. Contemporary notes, dated records, and independently verifiable facts can help clarify those distinctions. These are safeguards for evidence handling, not validated guarantees against false memories.
Avoid converting this advice into endless mental checking. A person who repeatedly questions ordinary memories or seeks reassurance may experience more uncertainty and distress. When persistent memory doubt affects daily life, an appropriately qualified professional can assess the broader concern. Imagination inflation by itself is a laboratory phenomenon, not a mental-health diagnosis.
Common Myths About Imagining and Remembering
Myth: Every vivid imagined event eventually becomes a false memory
Vivid images are frequently recognized as invented. Studies show variability, and most imagination-inflation measures detect small group-average changes in belief rather than universal conversion into convincing memories.
Myth: Repeating a visualization always increases false-memory risk
Repetition mattered in some controlled action-memory experiments, but other autobiographical studies found no added inflation after one exposure. A single dose-response rule does not fit the evidence.
Myth: Researchers can infer full false memories from higher event-likelihood scores
An event-belief judgment and a detailed recollective report are different measurements. The systematic review emphasizes this distinction and the methodological limits of classifying full memories.
Myth: Only highly suggestible or imaginative people experience the effect
Susceptibility depends on tasks and context. Individual-difference findings are inconsistent, including results of the 2025 registered report.
Myth: Discovering that imagination inflation exists proves that a particular memory is false
Scientific evidence about group-level susceptibility provides no direct verdict about any specific personal event. Historical questions require evidence about that event, the conditions in which reports arose, and corroboration.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can simply thinking about something make you remember it happened?
Thinking or imagining can increase familiarity and in some circumstances confidence that an event occurred. It does not reliably transform every thought into a memory. Studies distinguish belief shifts from subjective recollection and from verified false-event reports.
What is a simple example of imagination inflation?
A person pictures having attended a childhood camp, complete with a lake and dining hall. Later, the invented scene feels familiar, and the person becomes slightly more willing to believe they attended. That illustrates the phenomenon, while the truth of attendance still requires independent evidence.
Who discovered imagination inflation?
The influential childhood-event experiment was published by Maryanne Garry, Charles G. Manning, Elizabeth F. Loftus, and Steven J. Sherman in 1996. Related work on memory, source monitoring, and imagined actions developed before and after that study.
Is imagination inflation a type of false memory?
It is a process or experimental effect relevant to false-memory research. Its common outcome is increased autobiographical belief. Some related experiments document false source recollections, but a belief increase alone does not establish a fully formed false autobiographical memory.
How does imagination inflation work in the brain?
The cognitive evidence implicates source attribution, familiarity, fluent processing, and mental imagery. No single brain area or specific neural sequence has been established as a complete explanation of the behavioral effect. Neural accounts should be tied to direct evidence rather than inferred from general facts about memory networks.
Does imagination inflation work for childhood events only?
No. The original paradigm focused on childhood events, but research has examined imagined actions and events from adulthood. Whether the result appears and how large it is depends on the design and materials.
Can imagining a traumatic event create a false trauma memory?
Suggestive imagery can affect autobiographical beliefs, but laboratory imagination-inflation results cannot determine whether a particular trauma account is true or false. Trauma-related memory and clinical assessment require a separate evidence framework. Neither vivid recall nor uncertainty alone decides historical occurrence.
Is imagination inflation the same as the Mandela effect?
No. The Mandela effect is a popular name for shared erroneous recollections. Imagination inflation refers to a specified experimental manipulation and resulting change in autobiographical judgments. They can overlap conceptually through familiarity and reconstruction, but they are not interchangeable terms.
Does hypnosis cause imagination inflation?
Hypnosis and suggestion may involve imagery and source-judgment challenges, but the classic effect does not require hypnosis. Findings about one procedure should not automatically be transferred to another. Accuracy of a specific recalled event must be assessed independently.
Can writing a fictional story change the author's memories?
Writing and rehearsing fictional scenes can make them accessible and vivid. Whether the author later attributes a scene to personal experience is a separate source-memory question. There is no evidence that writing fiction ordinarily causes wholesale autobiographical memory replacement.
Can imagination inflation be prevented?
Some controlled studies indicate that source and familiarity cues reduce the effect under specified conditions. No established technique guarantees immunity. Maintaining a clear record of where details came from is sensible when factual accuracy matters.
Does imagination inflation mean memory cannot be trusted?
Human memory is generally useful and capable of accurate recollection while also being reconstructive and fallible. The phenomenon identifies one route to particular errors, not a universal defect in memory.
Scientific Conclusion
Imagination inflation is a reproducible, context-sensitive finding in experimental memory psychology: generating a representation of a possible event can alter later confidence that the event occurred. The strongest general evidence concerns modest changes in autobiographical belief, complemented by controlled action-memory experiments demonstrating false source judgments. Complete false autobiographical recollections are a higher evidential threshold and require separate measurement.
A rigorous interpretation joins source monitoring, familiarity, plausibility, and experimental controls while preserving the distinctions among possibility, belief, recollection, and historical truth. That is the central scientific value of imagination inflation: it shows how the construction of a mental scene can influence judgments about the past without allowing an investigator to declare any particular memory genuine or invented merely from its vividness.
Related Articles
False Memories: How They Form and What Research Shows examines the broader field of memory distortion, suggestion, and false autobiographical remembering.
Human Memory: Types, Processes, and How It Works explains the systems and processes of ordinary human remembering.
The Misinformation Effect in Eyewitness Memory reviews a neighboring, independently owned research topic concerning post-event suggestion.
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