People retain content while losing track of where it came from, so imagined, overheard and witnessed material become confusable.
Johnson and colleagues' 1993 framework treats source as a judgement made at retrieval from characteristics of the memory rather than as a tag stored with it. Vivid, detailed and fluent memories are attributed to perception; that is a heuristic, and it fails exactly when something imagined was vivid.
In practice
- A manager acts on a figure she is certain she read in the report, and heard in a corridor.
- A claim first met in a satirical piece is repeated a year later as news.
- Standing
- Supplies the mechanism behind memory conformity, imagination inflation and the sleeper effect.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Psychology & Behavior
- Essay
- A century and a half of measuring the mind