IMAGINATION INFLATION - IMAGINING A CHILDHOOD EVENT INFLATES CONFIDENCE THAT IT OCCURRED

Counterfactual imaginings are known to have far-reaching implications. in the present experiment, we ask if imagining events from one's past can affect memory for childhood events, We draw on the social psychol ogy Literature showing that imagining a future event increases the sub jective likelihood that the event will occur. The concepts of cognitiv e availability and the source-monitoring framework pro ride reasons to expect that imagination may inflate confidence that a childhood event ; occurred, However, people routinely produce myriad counterfactual im aginings (i.e., daydreams and fantasies) but usually do not confuse th em with past experiences. To determine the effects of imagining a chil dhood event, we pretested subjects on how confident they were that a n umber of childhood events had happened, asked them to imagine some of those events, and then gathered new confidence measures. For each of t he target items, imagination inflated confidence that the event had oc curred in childhood. We discuss implications for situations in which i magination is used as an aid in searching far presumably lost memories .