The false fame effect was first demonstrated by Jacoby and colleagues in 1989. Participants read a series of nonfamous names aloud, such as Sebastian Weisdorf or Valerie Marsh, under the guise of a pronunciation-speed study. Later, they were asked to judge which names in a mixed list were famous. When tested immediately, only about 12 percent of the old nonfamous names were erroneously selected as famous. When tested 24 hours later, that figure rose to 16 percent. The researchers concluded that with the passage of time, participants’ conscious recollection of the earlier learning episode faded while their sense of familiarity with the names remained intact, and that this familiarity was mistakenly attributed to fame.

According to the contextual change hypothesis, contextual features present during an event become associated with the information encoded during that event and can later function as retrieval cues. When a forget instruction or a diversionary thought shifts a person’s internal mental context between learning episodes, the currently available cues become progressively less effective for retrieving information associated with an earlier context. Previous research by Sahakyan and Delaney showed that explicitly inducing such a contextual shift between two lists of words, without telling participants to forget, was sufficient to impair subsequent recall of the first list. Critically, participants who received forget instructions frequently reported distracting themselves by thinking about something unrelated to the experiment, often an autobiographical memory, suggesting that a forget instruction might produce forgetting indirectly by encouraging participants to shift their thoughts away from the mental context in which the first list had been encoded.

The new study, conducted by Dorothy R. Buchli of Mercer University, extended this framework to memory distortion rather than simple forgetting. The central prediction was that if daydreaming tasks reliably transport participants to another place and time, they should create a discrepancy between the context present during encoding of the nonfamous names and the context present during the subsequent fame judgment task. If this contextual discrepancy underlies the errors in recollection that produce increased false fame judgments, then thinking about a distant place and time should elicit more forgetting and greater susceptibility to false fame than thinking about a less distant place and time.

Across two experiments, 138 undergraduate students from Mercer University participated in each study. Participants first studied a list of 24 nonfamous names, each presented on a computer screen for 5 seconds. They then completed a task designed to induce either a near or far shift in internal context. In Experiment 1, participants in the near context change condition mentally reconstructed and drew the layout of their own home, while those in the far context change condition drew the layout of their parents’ home. Control participants read a chapter aloud from an introductory psychology textbook for 90 seconds, a task that did not encourage mental context change. Afterward, all participants studied a list of 24 famous names and completed a fame judgment task containing old and new famous and nonfamous names.

The results were striking. Participants in the far context change condition erroneously judged 51 percent of old nonfamous names to be famous, compared with 42 percent in the near context change condition and 22 percent in the control condition. Signal detection analyses confirmed that participants’ ability to discriminate between famous and nonfamous names, indexed by d-prime scores, was significantly lower in the far context change condition than in the near condition, and lower in the near condition than in the control condition. Importantly, these differences were confined to old names; new nonfamous names showed no significant differences across conditions, indicating that the context shift specifically impaired recollection of the earlier learning episode rather than altering general decision criteria.

Experiment 2 replicated this pattern using a different manipulation. Instead of drawing home layouts, participants described either a recent domestic vacation or a recent international vacation within the last 5 years. Once again, the far context change condition produced more false fame judgments than the near condition, which in turn produced more than the control condition. Participants who described an international vacation erroneously judged 55 percent of old nonfamous names to be famous, compared with 46 percent for domestic vacations and 20 percent for controls. The d-prime analyses again revealed reduced discrimination between famous and nonfamous names following larger context shifts.

Perhaps the most novel contribution of the study was the introduction of mental miles as a quantifiable measure of contextual discrepancy. The geographic distance between Mercer University and each participant’s imagined location was estimated. In Experiment 1, the near context change group traveled an average of 2.5 miles to their current home, while the far group traveled an average of 165 miles to their parents’ home. In Experiment 2, domestic vacations averaged 893 miles, while international vacations averaged 4,206 miles. Across both experiments, the correlation between distance in miles and the proportion of old nonfamous names judged to be famous was significant, with r values of 0.29 and 0.32 respectively. Thus, susceptibility to false fame increased not only as a function of the experimentally defined context-change conditions, but also as a function of the magnitude of the mental distance traveled during the daydreaming task.

The findings converge with almost 50 years of research on context-dependent memory, including the classic demonstration by Godden and Baddeley that divers recalled words better in the environment where they originally learned them. The present study extends this work beyond intentional forgetting to memory distortion. Rather than simply making previously encoded information less accessible, changes in internal context appear capable of altering how residual familiarity is interpreted. When recollection of the original learning context is impaired, familiarity with previously encountered nonfamous names may instead be misattributed to fame. This mechanism has real-world parallels, as mistaken eyewitness identifications often arise when a familiar but innocent person is misidentified because the source of the familiarity is incorrectly attributed to the crime rather than to prior benign interactions.

Many important questions remain. The near and far conditions likely differed along several dimensions simultaneously, including temporal distance, personal relevance, novelty, and emotional salience, so mental miles may serve as one measurable indicator of a broader shift in internal context rather than a sole causal factor. Future research could isolate these dimensions experimentally, for example by manipulating geographic distance while holding recency constant, or by asking participants to imagine themselves in the same location at different points in their lives. It is also worth recognizing that context change is unlikely to be an all-or-none phenomenon; even the control task may have produced some degree of internal context change as participants transitioned from studying names to reading aloud. The critical distinction may not be between the presence and absence of context change, but rather the magnitude of the change, a graded interpretation consistent with the pattern observed across the control, near, and far conditions in both experiments.

Subject of Research: false fame effect, contextual change, daydreaming, memory distortion, source monitoring

Article Title: The more “mental miles” traveled during daydreaming task, the greater one's susceptibility to false fame: further evidence in support of a contextual change account of the false fame effect

Article References: The more “mental miles” traveled during daydreaming task, the greater one's susceptibility to false fame: further evidence in support of a contextual change account of the false fame effect. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.3389/fcogn.2026.1941362

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fcogn.2026.1941362

Keywords: false fame effect, contextual change, daydreaming, memory distortion, source monitoring, familiarity misattribution, signal detection, directed forgetting, autobiographical memory, cognitive psychology, mental, miles