Imagination inflation
Merely imagining an event makes you more confident it actually happened.
What it means
Repeatedly or vividly imagining a hypothetical event raises a person's subjective confidence that the event truly occurred in their past. The likely mechanism is twofold: imagination adds sensory and contextual detail to the memory, and it increases the event's familiarity, both of which are later misread as signs of a real experience through faulty source monitoring. The effect is a documented route to full-blown false memories of childhood events that never took place. It has direct implications for therapeutic techniques that rely on guided imagery to 'recover' memories. It demonstrates that the act of imagining is not a neutral probe of memory but can alter the very record it queries.
Examples
People who imagine breaking a window as a child later rate that event as more likely to have actually happened to them.
A witness asked to picture how the burglar 'might have' climbed in later describes the entry with real confidence — the imagined version has been filed alongside the things she actually saw.
You picture yourself locking the front door so vividly on the walk to the station that by lunchtime you are sure you did it. The rehearsal has become the memory.
First described in Garry, Manning, Loftus & Sherman (1996).