Misattribution of Memory

Snap Shot

• The question: Can a person remember something genuine, such as a face, a detail, or an idea, but assign it to the wrong time, place, person, or source, and what does that mean for testimony?
• What the research shows: Memories carry no built-in label of their origin; people infer the source from a memory’s qualities, and they sometimes infer it wrongly. Laboratory studies show that familiarity can be mistaken for recollection, suggested details can be remembered as seen, imagined events can be remembered as experienced, and related but unpresented items can be falsely recognized. These errors increase with weak encoding, divided attention, delay, and similarity between sources, and they decrease when people are prompted to think about where a memory came from.
• What it does not show: Misattribution errors are not inevitable, and in many source-monitoring studies most memories are attributed correctly. The research does not show that a particular witness misattributed a particular memory, and, in source-monitoring research, confidence, vividness, and emotion have not reliably distinguished a correctly sourced memory from a misattributed one (confidence recorded at a fair initial identification is treated in “Confidence and Accuracy”).
• The law: Expert testimony on misattribution is governed by Rule 702 (as amended in 2023) and, in courts-martial, Houser; it is general and educational and may not declare a witness’s memory true or false (Brooks; Lindsey). Arizona permits such testimony in the court’s discretion (Chapple; Nordstrom).
• Issues for each side: Prosecutors can show that source errors are conditional, that distinctive material, and in some laboratory studies emotional material, resists them, and that a well-documented first account has special value; defense counsel can show the conditions under which a sincere witness may assign a real memory to the wrong source, tied to evidence that those conditions existed.

A witness may genuinely remember a face but be wrong about where it was seen. A complainant may sincerely recall a detail that was actually supplied by an investigator, a friend, or a news report. An accused person may come to remember having done something that was only discussed or imagined. In each case something real is being remembered; the error lies in its attribution. Psychologists call this misattribution: assigning a memory, or a feeling of familiarity, to the wrong source.

Misattribution matters in court because the legal question is often not whether a person remembers something but where that memory came from. Identification evidence, a witness’s account of who said or did what, and the significance of details in a confession can all turn on source. Like other memory errors, misattribution is not lying. The person who makes a source error ordinarily believes the attribution and may be confident in it.

This paper describes the framework that grouped these errors together, the source-monitoring account of how people judge where memories come from, the principal forms of misattribution, the conditions that reduce such errors, the limits of the research, and the law governing expert testimony on the subject. Forms that have their own papers in this resource are summarized only briefly.

The “Seven Sins” Framework

Schacter (1999) proposed grouping everyday memory failures into seven categories, which he called “sins”: transience (loss of memory over time), absent-mindedness (lapses of attention), blocking (temporary inability to retrieve), misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence (unwanted recurrent memories). The first three are failures of omission; misattribution, suggestibility, and bias involve distortion; and persistence involves remembering what one would prefer to forget. Misattribution, in this scheme, covers remembering something but assigning it to the wrong source, and includes misplaced familiarity, false recognition, and inadvertent plagiarism (Schacter, 1999; Schacter & Dodson, 2001). Suggestibility, the incorporation of information from leading questions or other people, is treated as a separate sin, although the two overlap because a suggested detail that is later remembered as witnessed is also a source error.

The framework treats these errors as by-products of a memory system that generally serves people well. Remembering the gist of experiences, generalizing across similar events, and drawing on general knowledge are efficient, but they also make it possible to blend related experiences or to fill a gap with what probably happened (Schacter et al., 2011). Schacter (2022a) later summarized two decades of research extending each category, and a companion review found that manipulated photographs are associated with false memories for personal events and fabricated news but found no evidence of a broader increase in susceptibility to distortion among heavy media users (Schacter, 2022b). The framework is a classification, not a test; it organizes findings but does not by itself explain why a particular error occurred.

How People Judge Where a Memory Came From

The most widely used account of misattribution is the source-monitoring framework (Johnson et al., 1993). Under this account, memories are not stored with a label identifying their source. Instead, when a person remembers, he or she infers the source from the memory’s characteristics: perceptual detail (sights, sounds), spatial and temporal context, emotional reactions, and traces of the mental operations that produced it, such as the effort of imagining or reasoning. These judgments are usually quick and automatic, but people can also evaluate a memory more deliberately, for example by asking whether it fits with other things they know (Johnson et al., 1993; Lane & Houston, 2021, pp. 61–66). An earlier formulation, reality monitoring, addressed the specific question of distinguishing memories of perceived events from memories of things only thought or imagined (Johnson & Raye, 1981).

Because source is inferred, it can be inferred wrongly. Errors are more likely when two possible sources are similar, when the event was encoded with little attention to its context, when the person must decide quickly, when the person holds mistaken beliefs about which features signal a real memory, and when details from related memories are imported into the one being judged (Lane & Houston, 2021, pp. 65–66). In one study, dividing participants’ attention while they watched an event increased their later tendency to report suggested details as seen (Lane, 2006). Imaging research implicates prefrontal regions in evaluating source and medial temporal regions in binding details together (Mitchell & Johnson, 2009). A 2023 study using electrodes implanted in the human hippocampus found that activity there tracked how similar a falsely recalled word’s original context was to the target list, and could predict which list a recalled word came from (Herz et al., 2023). These are group-level laboratory findings with word lists; they help explain the mechanism but cannot be used to determine the source of a particular witness’s memory.

Familiarity Without Recollection

One basic form of misattribution occurs when a person feels that something is familiar but cannot recall why, and attributes the familiarity to the wrong cause. In a classic set of experiments, participants read a list of nonfamous names. When tested immediately, they could recall having read the names and correctly rejected them as not famous; after a day’s delay, when that recollection had faded but some familiarity remained, they became more likely to judge the same names famous (Jacoby et al., 1989). In other studies, words that were easy to process because they completed a predictable sentence were more likely to be judged as having been studied earlier, even when they had not been; the ease of processing was mistaken for a sign of prior experience (Whittlesea, 1993).

A feeling of familiarity, standing alone, is therefore ambiguous evidence about its source, which is the basis for concern about a witness who recognizes a face without recalling the earlier encounter. Under a dual-process view of recognition, familiarity without recollection is a weak basis for an identification (Lane & Houston, 2021, pp. 50–51).

Source Misattribution and Suggestion

Misattribution provides one explanation for the misinformation effect. When witnesses who received misleading information about an event were asked specifically where they remembered each detail from, some reported remembering seeing details that had only been suggested to them; the researchers called this the source misattribution effect. The same experiments found that the size of the effect varied and that source errors were not an inevitable consequence of exposure to suggestion (Zaragoza & Lane, 1994). In an earlier study, the suggestibility effect seen on a standard recognition test was eliminated when participants were instead given a test that directed them to think about the source of each memory, indicating that many misled participants could identify where the suggestion came from when prompted to do so (Lindsay & Johnson, 1989).

The two findings together frame the forensic issue. Suggested details can come to be experienced as memories of the event, and a witness may sincerely report them as such. At the same time, people often retain information about where they learned something, and procedures that focus attention on source reduce errors. The papers on the misinformation effect and on source monitoring cover these topics in depth.

Imagined Versus Experienced Events

Reality-monitoring errors occur when something a person imagined, thought, or said is later remembered as having been perceived or done. In laboratory studies, participants who imagined some objects and saw pictures of others sometimes later claimed to have seen pictures of objects they had only imagined, and confusions occurred across sensory modalities (Henkel et al., 2000). Imagining an action can lead people to remember later that they performed it, and repeated imagining increases that tendency, a finding discussed in the paper on imagination inflation.

These errors have been discussed in relation to statements of accused persons. Henkel and Coffman (2004) analyzed, within the source-monitoring framework, how interrogation tactics that lead a suspect to think about, imagine, or describe a crime could contribute in some cases to a belief in guilt and to false memories supporting it. Their paper is a theoretical analysis rather than an experiment, and it does not show that any particular admission reflects a misattributed memory. Readers interested in interrogation are referred to the False Confessions resources.

False Recognition, Cryptomnesia, and Unconscious Transference

Three further forms have their own papers in this resource and are summarized only briefly here. In false recognition, people who study words associated with an unpresented word (bed, rest, tired, but not sleep) often recall or recognize the missing word, sometimes with a sense of specific recollection (Roediger & McDermott, 1995); a review attributed the effect to activation of related concepts at study and to failures of monitoring at test (Gallo, 2010), and its forensic reach is limited because it uses word lists. In cryptomnesia, people who took turns generating category examples or puzzle solutions later sometimes offered another person’s contribution as their own new idea (Brown & Murphy, 1989; Marsh & Bower, 1993). In unconscious transference, a familiar but innocent person is mistaken for the perpetrator: viewers exposed to a bystander in a film were more likely to choose him from a lineup without the perpetrator (Ross et al., 1994), and a meta-analysis found that prior mugshot exposure reduced correct and increased false lineup identifications, most strongly when the witness had chosen someone from the mugshots (Deffenbacher et al., 2006).

What Reduces Misattribution, and Where Memory Holds Up

The research on misattribution is not only a catalogue of error. Many participants in source-misattribution studies attribute their memories correctly, and the errors are conditional. Directing people to consider where a memory came from reduced suggestibility effects in the laboratory (Lindsay & Johnson, 1989). People also use the expected richness of a memory as a check: participants who said study words aloud, rather than only hearing them, later made fewer false recognition errors, apparently reasoning that a word they had actually said would be remembered distinctly (Dodson & Schacter, 2001). Warnings, instruction about which features are diagnostic, source-focused test formats, and corrective feedback all reduce false memories, although they rarely eliminate them (Lane & Houston, 2021, pp. 81–87).

In one series of laboratory experiments, emotional content protected source memory. Participants made fewer reality-monitoring errors, confusing imagined with seen items less often, for negative, arousing items than for neutral ones, apparently because the emotional items were remembered with more contextual detail (Kensinger & Schacter, 2006). This finding comes from words and pictures rather than personal events and has not been established for personally experienced events; the relationship between emotion and memory is complex, and stress and arousal can impair memory for other details (see “Emotion, Stress, Trauma, and Memory” and “Memory for Violence and Weapon Focus”), so it does not show that emotionally significant events are protected from source error. Memory for what happened is also often more durable than memory for the precise circumstances of learning it, so a source error about a peripheral detail does not by itself impeach the core of an account.

Limits of the Evidence

Most misattribution research uses word lists, pictures, short films, or simple actions, with student participants, short delays, and no personal stakes. These designs isolate mechanisms well, but they leave open how often the same errors occur in real cases involving personally significant events, and the research does not settle which details in a real account are most vulnerable. Neuroscience findings, including recordings from neurosurgical patients and imaging studies, are averages across trials and people and cannot classify an individual memory. Rates of error differ widely across procedures and measures; a study that asks participants to identify the source of each detail typically produces fewer errors than one that asks only whether an item is familiar. Above all, this is group research. It identifies conditions under which source errors become more or less likely; it cannot establish that a particular witness misattributed a particular memory, and confidence, vividness, and emotion have not been reliable guides, in source-monitoring research, to whether a memory’s source is correct.

Questions to Ask About This Research

When a source-misattribution study is cited, counsel should ask what exactly was measured: whether participants were asked only whether a detail was familiar or were asked specifically where they remembered it from, because the second kind of test, as in Lindsay and Johnson (1989), can greatly reduce apparent errors, and Zaragoza and Lane (1994) found that source errors varied in size and were not inevitable. When the false-fame or fluency studies (Jacoby et al., 1989; Whittlesea, 1993) or the word-list studies (Roediger & McDermott, 1995) are offered to explain a witness’s error, counsel should ask whether the conclusion follows from the design, given that those studies used names and words rather than faces, people, or personal events.

Counsel should also ask whether the research applies to this person: whether there is evidence that the witness was exposed to a competing source, such as a suggestion, a photograph, a prior encounter, or another person’s account, before giving the account in question; whether the conditions that raise source errors, such as divided attention, delay, and similar sources, were present; and whether the first recorded account predates the possible exposure. When neuroscience is cited, counsel should ask how much evidence supports applying it to an individual, given that findings such as those of Herz et al. (2023) are averages from laboratory word lists. These questions are explained in “Reading Research Claims: A Guide for Attorneys” on this site.

Misattribution of Memory and the Law

Federal and Military Standards

Expert testimony about misattribution is governed by Federal Rule of Evidence 702, which as amended December 1, 2023, requires the proponent to show that it is more likely than not that the testimony rests on sufficient facts or data, is the product of reliable principles and methods, and reflects a reliable application of those methods to the case. Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (1993) assigned trial judges a gatekeeping role, and Kumho Tire Co. v. Carmichael (1999) extended that obligation to all expert testimony, including non-scientific technical or specialized knowledge. In courts-martial, Military Rule of Evidence 702 tracks the federal rule, and under Military Rule of Evidence 1102 the 2023 federal amendment became part of the military rule in 2025 (Joint Service Committee on Military Justice, 2025); practitioners should confirm current text. United States v. Houser (1993) requires the proponent to establish the expert’s qualifications, the subject matter, the basis, legal relevance, reliability, and that probative value outweighs other considerations. An expert may not vouch for or against a witness’s credibility (United States v. Brooks, 2007), so testimony may describe the conditions under which source errors occur but may not tell members that a particular memory was misattributed.

Arizona

Arizona Rule of Evidence 702 adopted the Daubert standard effective January 1, 2012 and was amended effective January 1, 2024 to track the 2023 federal amendment (Ariz. Sup. Ct. Order R-23-0004). State v. Chapple (1983) is Arizona’s leading case on expert testimony about memory and identification: the Arizona Supreme Court held that excluding such testimony was an abuse of discretion on the facts of that case, and State v. Nordstrom (2001) confirmed that admission otherwise rests in the trial court’s discretion and approved limiting the expert to general factors. Experts may not opine on whether a particular witness is truthful or accurate (State v. Lindsey, 1986, 149 Ariz. at 475).

Special Issues in Legal Practice

The principles described above apply with equal force to every party in a legal proceeding. The science operates the same way regardless of who is asking the questions, and the research summarized here does not by itself favor either side. What differs between the parties is not the science but the vantage point — the particular places where these issues tend to surface, and the particular errors each party is best positioned to guard against. The two summaries below identify those recurring issues. They are offered for orientation, not as litigation strategy; in every case the controlling question is what the evidence in that case will, and will not, support, and the expert’s role is to inform the trier of fact rather than to advocate for either side.

Special Issues for Prosecutors

The research supports several propositions prosecutors can legitimately present. Source errors are conditional rather than inevitable; in the laboratory, many people correctly identify where a memory came from, especially when prompted to think about source. In one series of laboratory experiments with words and pictures, negative arousing items were less often confused with imagined ones than neutral items (Kensinger & Schacter, 2006; not established for personally experienced events), and an error about the source of a peripheral detail does not by itself show that the core of an account is wrong. A first account recorded before any opportunity for exposure to competing sources carries particular value, and prosecutors are well positioned to secure that value by ensuring that early statements are recorded, that identification procedures avoid prior exposure to the suspect’s image, and that investigators document what information was shared with witnesses.

The research also counsels caution. A witness can sincerely and confidently attribute a genuine memory to the wrong source, and, once exposure has occurred, confidence and vividness have not reliably distinguished correct from incorrect attributions in source-monitoring research (confidence recorded at a fair first test can be informative; see “Confidence and Accuracy”). Where a detail first appears after a witness was exposed to a suggestion, a photograph, or another person’s account, or where an identified person was encountered in another setting, the factfinder is entitled to consider that sequence, and argument that treats familiarity as proof of presence at the crime goes beyond the research. The same principles apply to an accused’s admissions, which are probative of knowledge only if the details were not supplied.

Special Issues for Defense

The research supports several propositions defense counsel can legitimately present. Memories carry no built-in label of their source, and people can mistake familiarity for recollection, suggested details for observed ones, and imagined events for experienced ones. These errors become more likely with weak encoding, divided attention, delay, and similar competing sources. Expert testimony explaining these principles, combined with evidence of a witness’s exposure to a competing source, is a legitimate way to help the factfinder evaluate an identification or an account, and the same principles bear on how an accused’s statements were shaped by questioning.

The research also counsels caution about the limits that apply to the defense. The existence of misattribution in the laboratory does not show that it occurred in a particular case, and an expert cannot tell the factfinder that a particular memory was misattributed. Source errors are not inevitable, many studies use words and pictures rather than personal events, and in one series of laboratory experiments negative arousing items were less often confused with imagined ones, a finding not established for personally experienced events. A misattribution argument is strongest when it is tied to documented exposure to a specific competing source before the account was given, and weakest when it rests only on the general possibility of error.

This paper is for educational purposes only and is not legal advice. The author is a psychologist, not an attorney; summaries of law are general and must be verified against current authority or with a licensed attorney.

References

Brown, A. S., & Murphy, D. R. (1989). Cryptomnesia: Delineating inadvertent plagiarism. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 15(3), 432–442. https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.15.3.432

Deffenbacher, K. A., Bornstein, B. H., & Penrod, S. D. (2006). Mugshot exposure effects: Retroactive interference, mugshot commitment, source confusion, and unconscious transference. Law and Human Behavior, 30(3), 287–307. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10979-006-9008-1

Dodson, C. S., & Schacter, D. L. (2001). “If I had said it I would have remembered it”: Reducing false memories with a distinctiveness heuristic. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 8(1), 155–161. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03196152

Gallo, D. A. (2010). False memories and fantastic beliefs: 15 years of the DRM illusion. Memory & Cognition, 38(7), 833–848. https://doi.org/10.3758/MC.38.7.833

Henkel, L. A., & Coffman, K. J. (2004). Memory distortions in coerced false confessions: A source monitoring framework analysis. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 18(5), 567–588. https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.1026

Henkel, L. A., Franklin, N., & Johnson, M. K. (2000). Cross-modal source monitoring confusions between perceived and imagined events. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 26(2), 321–335. https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.26.2.321

Herz, N., Bukala, B. R., Kragel, J. E., & Kahana, M. J. (2023). Hippocampal activity predicts contextual misattribution of false memories. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(40), Article e2305292120. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2305292120

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Johnson, M. K., & Raye, C. L. (1981). Reality monitoring. Psychological Review, 88(1), 67–85. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.88.1.67

Joint Service Committee on Military Justice. (2025). Amendments to the Military Rules of Evidence since 1984 (G. E. Maggs, Ed.; 2025 ed.). https://jsc.defense.gov/Portals/99/MRE%20Amendments%202025.pdf

Kensinger, E. A., & Schacter, D. L. (2006). Reality monitoring and memory distortion: Effects of negative, arousing content. Memory & Cognition, 34(2), 251–260. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03193403

Lane, S. M. (2006). Dividing attention during a witnessed event increases eyewitness suggestibility. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 20(2), 199–212. https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.1177

Lane, S. M., & Houston, K. A. (2021). Understanding eyewitness memory: Theory and applications. New York University Press.

Lindsay, D. S., & Johnson, M. K. (1989). The eyewitness suggestibility effect and memory for source. Memory & Cognition, 17(3), 349–358. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03198473

Marsh, R. L., & Bower, G. H. (1993). Eliciting cryptomnesia: Unconscious plagiarism in a puzzle task. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 19(3), 673–688. https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.19.3.673

Mitchell, K. J., & Johnson, M. K. (2009). Source monitoring 15 years later: What have we learned from fMRI about the neural mechanisms of source memory? Psychological Bulletin, 135(4), 638–677. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0015849

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Ross, D. F., Ceci, S. J., Dunning, D., & Toglia, M. P. (1994). Unconscious transference and mistaken identity: When a witness misidentifies a familiar but innocent person. Journal of Applied Psychology, 79(6), 918–930. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.79.6.918

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Schacter, D. L. (2022a). The seven sins of memory: An update. Memory, 30(1), 37–42. https://doi.org/10.1080/09658211.2021.1873391

Schacter, D. L. (2022b). Media, technology, and the sins of memory. Memory, Mind & Media, 1, Article e1. https://doi.org/10.1017/mem.2021.3

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Zaragoza, M. S., & Lane, S. M. (1994). Source misattributions and the suggestibility of eyewitness memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 20(4), 934–945. https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.20.4.934

Legal Authorities

Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., 509 U.S. 579 (1993).

Kumho Tire Co. v. Carmichael, 526 U.S. 137 (1999).

State v. Chapple, 135 Ariz. 281, 660 P.2d 1208 (1983).

State v. Lindsey, 149 Ariz. 472, 720 P.2d 73 (1986).

State v. Nordstrom, 200 Ariz. 229, 25 P.3d 717 (2001).

United States v. Brooks, 64 M.J. 325 (C.A.A.F. 2007).

United States v. Houser, 36 M.J. 392 (C.M.A. 1993).

Ariz. Sup. Ct. Order R-23-0004 (2023) (amending Ariz. R. Evid. 702, effective Jan. 1, 2024).

Fed. R. Evid. 702.

Ariz. R. Evid. 702.

Mil. R. Evid. 702.

Mil. R. Evid. 1102.

Related topic papers: Source Monitoring · Cryptomnesia · Unconscious Transference · Imagination Inflation · The Misinformation Effect · False Memory

Related topics from Arizona Forensic Services: False Confessions