2026/08/02 by Mahveen Salman Mubarak, Keisuke Fukuda · 1 voice
Neuroscience · #Memory Processes and Influences #Memory and Neural Mechanisms #Neural and Behavioral Psychology Studies #Event (particle physics) #False memory #Episodic memory #Outcome (game theory) #Test (biology) #Recall #Naturalism
paper · doi:10.31234/osf.io/acshn_v1
openalex publication_date 2026/08/02 · openalex created_date 2026/08/03 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
The human brain predicts incoming visual events to make sense of the world in real time. While prior work has shown that explicit predictions can induce false memories of the predicted event using artificial and decontextualized stimuli, whether these distortions generalize to naturalistic settings remains unknown. To test this, participants viewed first-person videos of everyday events, that paused midway to prompt predictions about what would happen next, followed by the actual outcome. Predictions were either confirmed by the predicted event occurring, directly rebutted by a different event occurring, or left unresolved with no outcome shown. Across four experiments, we show that merely generating a prediction is sufficient to induce a false memory of the predicted event in a rich, naturalistic context, even when that prediction is directly rebutted. This effect persisted regardless of whether participants were explicitly instructed to remember the actual outcome and was, in fact, amplified under incident encoding. Strikingly, these false memories not only survived a 24-hour delay but became stronger in the absence of feedback, as veridical memories deteriorated. Together, these findings demonstrate the strong influence of predictions on what we remember, underlining the powerful role of expectations in shaping episodic memories even under ecologically valid conditions.