It is well known that memory is an active and reconstructive process and that what we remember happened may not always be what actually happened. This is important in real-life situations like the criminal court and the therapy room because it means that we can never entirely rely on the accuracy of what people, in good faith, tell us they remember.
Several factors can change a memory when it is recalled. One of the most interesting of these is misattribution. This occurs when we correctly remember aspects of a scene but attribute the memory to the wrong source. So a face might be recognised as familiar but remembered as someone different, and a fictional event might be remembered as real.
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