In psychology, a false memory refers to a mental experience that’s remembered as factual but is either entirely false or significantly different from what actually occurred. These can be small details, like misremembering the color of a car, or more substantial, like entirely fabricated events.

Human memory is not a literal reproduction of the past, but instead relies on constructive processes that are sometimes prone to error and distortion.

Recalling items from scratch is harder than recognizing the correct option in a list of choices because the extra context helps users retrieve information from memory.