Our cheatin' brain: The brain's clever way of showing us the world as a whole
Whether we choose to admit it or not, we all experience memory errors from time to time. Research has suggested that false memory may be a result of having too many other things to remember or perhaps if too much time has passed. However, previous studies have indicated that a specific type of false memory known as "boundary extension" occurs for different reasons. Boundary extension is a mistake that we often make when recalling a view of a scene—we will insist that the boundaries of an image stretched out farther than what we actually saw. Although this error is very common and occurs in people of all ages (from young children to the elderly), few studies have been done examining how quickly boundary extension occurs. That is, it was unknown how long a scene needs to be interrupted before the viewer experiences boundary extension and is convinced they saw more than they actually did.