What phenomenon refers to the increased likelihood of judging an event as having actually occurred when one imagines it?

The phenomenon referred to in this context is commonly known as imagination inflation. It occurs when simply imagining an event increases the confidence that the imagined event actually took place. This can lead to individuals having vivid memories of events that never happened or have been distorted through the process of imagination.

Imagination inflation can have significant implications in areas such as memory recall, eyewitness testimony, and even therapy, where vividly imagining a situation can make individuals believe in the reality of those imagined scenarios. Through repeated mental visualization, people can inadvertently strengthen their false memories, reinforcing the idea that these events might be true simply due to their imagination of them.

In contrast, functional fixedness refers to the cognitive bias that limits a person’s ability to use an object in a new way. Gambler's fallacy involves the mistaken belief that future probabilities are altered by past events in a random sequence, while infantile amnesia describes the inability of adults to retrieve memories from the early years of childhood. These concepts do not relate to the effects of imagination on memory.