People confidently recall a word that was never presented when every word on the list was associated with it.
A list of bed, rest, awake, tired and dream reliably produces recall of sleep, which was never shown. Roediger and McDermott revived Deese's 1959 finding in 1995 and demonstrated that the false memory arrives with the same confidence and the same sense of recollection as the true ones. It is the cleanest laboratory demonstration that vividness is not evidence of accuracy.
In practice
- A witness recalls the weapon that fits every other detail of the scene and was not there.
- A reviewer remembers a paragraph that the document implies throughout and never contains.