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Imagination inflation refers to the finding that imagining an event which never happened can increase confidence that it actually occurred. This effect is relevant to the study of memory and cognition, particularly false memory. Imagination inflation is one way that techniques intended to retrieve repressed memories (i.e. via recovered memory therapy) may lead to the development of false or distorted memories. Imagination inflation may occur via increased familiarity: imagining a false event makes it feel more familiar, and people mistake this feeling of familiarity for evidence that they have experienced the event.〔 Alternatively, imagination inflation could be the result of source confusion. When imagining a false past event, people generate information about it, and some is stored in their memory. Later they might remember the content but not its source, mistakenly attributing the information they can recall to a real experience instead of to their imagination.〔 Research on imagination inflation can be applied to other fields, such as criminal justice. The police interrogation practices of asking suspects to repeatedly imagine committing a crime,〔 or explaining how they could have done it,〔 are claimed to be causes of false confessions. ==Early research== In 1996 Elizabeth Loftus, along with Maryanne Garry, Charles Manning, and Steven Sherman, conducted the original imagination inflation study. This was the first study to examine what imagining false events would do to memory in the absence of other factors present in previous studies, such as social pressure to attempt to recall an incident or to report one’s past consistently with information provided by a parent.〔〔 The act of imagining unexperienced childhood events, such as being rescued by a lifeguard or breaking a window with one's hand, increased confidence that the events had occurred. After people imagined events with low initial confidence ratings, i.e. ones which they originally said they had not experienced, they became more confident that the events took place compared with unimagined ones.〔 Due to the unreliability of memory, it is not possible to be certain whether or not someone has had a given experience based solely on their own report.〔 This leaves open the possibility that imagination does not actually have any effect on beliefs about false past events, but simply helps people to retrieve actual memories of true experiences. Another early study by Lyn Goff and Henry Roediger used a different method to study imagination inflation effect for events which ''can'' be confirmed not to have taken place. It also extended this body of research by looking at the effect of imagination on recognition reports rather than confidence ratings. People performed some actions (such as breaking a toothpick) but not others, then imagined doing some actions out of the overall set, and finally were given a list of old actions encountered in the first two parts of the study and brand new actions. They were more likely to mistakenly say that they had performed imagined than unimagined actions. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Imagination inflation」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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