Mistaken memories: Remembering events that never happened

Our memories can be accurate, but they are not always accurate. Eyewitness testimony, for example, is notoriously unreliable. Insights into both veridical and false remembering have come from recent investigations of memory distortion. Behavioral measures have been used to demonstrate false memory phenomena in the laboratory, and neuroimaging measures have been used to provide clues about the relevant events in the brain that support remembering versus misremembering. A central category of misremembering results from confusion between memories for perceived and imagined events, which may result from overlap between particular features of the stored information comprising memories for perceived and imagined events.