The effects of episodic gist and sleep on false memory

False memory can arise from a sense of familiarity due to having previously encountered similar items; however, some false memories are rich in episodic detail (phantom recollection), which cannot be explained by mere familiarity. The current study hypothesizes that episodic and semantic gist representations combine to form phantom recollection, and that this occurs at encoding. Limited research has investigated whether phantom recollection implicates encoding or retrieval processes; however, some research suggests that they are the result of errant binding during retrieval. This was investigated by (1) measuring response times at test and (2) measuring the effect of sleep consolidation on phantom recollection. In both experiments, similar reaction times were found for true and phantom recollection, both of which were faster than familiarity based responses. This suggests that phantom recollection is the product of information, both episodic and semantic, that is encoded during the study of associated words.