A false item introduced by another person is subsequently recalled as one's own memory of the original event.
Roediger and colleagues had subjects study scenes with a confederate who reported items that had not been present. Subjects later recalled those items at well above baseline, and often attributed them to the scene rather than the confederate. The mechanism is source monitoring failure: the content is retained and the origin is not.
In practice
- A detail invented in a handover is in the incident report a week later with nobody's name attached to it.
- An anecdote heard about a friend's holiday is told years afterwards as one's own.