Results show that over time, half of the participants developed false memories of these fictitious events. In Chrobak and Zaragoza (2008), participants were asked to describe entire fictitious events that they had never witnessed. Studies have also shown that making up information, or what researchers call “confabulating” information, results in memory failure for the truth. Studies have demonstrated an inflation effect by exposing participants to the false information using a variety of paradigms such as paraphrasing ( Sharman, Garry, & Beuke, 2004) and explanations ( Sharman, Manning, & Garry, 2005). Since then, other studies have shown that imagination is not the only way to increase belief in counter-factual events. This now famous effect is commonly referred to as the ‘imagination inflation’ effect, because it has been shown that through imagining an event their belief in the event becomes more likely, or their belief in the event becomes inflated. Garry, Manning, Loftus, and Sherman (1996) showed that participants who initially reported that certain childhood events had not happened, but then imagined they had happened, increased their confidence in the false events.
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