Misinformation Effect: How False Memories Get Implanted

Eyewitness memory isn't a recording — it's reconstructed every time it's recalled, and that reconstruction can absorb details that were never actually witnessed. This simulator models Elizabeth Loftus's misinformation-effect paradigm inside the source-monitoring framework: a 3D memory trace made of 24 feature-binding nodes starts fully accurate, then decays with time since the event and gets exposed to a leading-question "suggestion source." Each exposure has a real chance of silently overwriting a true detail with the suggested one — watch individual nodes flip from green to red as trace fidelity drops, the probability of reporting a false detail climbs, and the source-monitoring confusion index tracks how blurred the line between "what I saw" and "what I was told" becomes. A retrieval-practice toggle shows how testing your memory soon after an event protects it from later contamination.