false memory
a distorted recollection of an event or, most severely, recollection of an event that never actually happened. False memories are errors of commission, because details, facts, or events come to mind, often vividly, but the remembrances fail to correspond to prior events. Even when people are highly confident that they are remembering “the truth” of the original situation, experimental evidence shows that they can be wrong. For example, one quarter of adults in a particular experiment who were told an untrue story about being lost in a mall as a child—ostensibly obtained from their family members—adopted the story, sometimes embellishing it with vivid sensory detail (e.g., the clothes that the rescuer was wearing). The phenomenon is of particular interest in legal cases, specifically those involving eyewitness memories and false memory syndrome (FMS), in which adults seem to recover memories of having been physically or sexually
abused as children, with such recoveries often occurring during therapy. The label is controversial, as is the evidence for and against recovery of abuse memories; false memory syndrome is not an accepted diagnostic term, and some have suggested using the more neutral phrase recovered memory. Also called illusory memory; paramnesia; pseudomemory.