A recent study has found about one-third of people can, if prompted, 'remember' or at least believe events that never actually happened.

It is a confronting finding in an era when fake news is said to be proliferating online and has been blamed for influencing the recent US presidential election.

The study from the University of Warwick in the UK surveyed 423 people, and found that 30 per cent could recall things that had never actually happened to them.

Associate professor Ullrich Ecker researches memory at the University of Western Australia, and told 720 ABC Perth the way the brain stored memories meant it was often unreliable.

"Lots of people think memory works a bit like a video tape, but it is more like a jigsaw puzzle," Dr Ecker said.

"If you experience an event, that event may consist of many different pieces of information."

Memories stored in different parts of brain

An event such as attending a football match for the first time as child creates not one memory, but many separate ones.

"You go to the stadium, see the people, see the stadium, smell the meat pies, hear the crowd. You will have an emotional response, thoughts, you know who is with you," Dr Ecker said.

"All those details are actually processed in different areas of the brain and that is also where they are stored.

"So for you to remember and re-live that experience later on, you actually need to put all those pieces back together again."

However, unlike a jigsaw puzzle, our brains will allow us to put pieces together that do not fit — and this is why memory can fail or perpetuate wrong information.

"That's what this research shows — we can actually build totally new pictures out of all kinds of puzzle pieces that are not actually related," Dr Ecker said.

"The main function of memory is actually not to remember stuff; one of the main functions of memory is to allow us to imagine things and to plan the future."

Creating false memories 'quite easy'

Dr Ecker said the University of Warwick findings confirmed what memory researchers had found in many previous studies — that it was quite easy to give people false memories.

The study involved interviewing young adults about various childhood experiences that had been verified with their parents.

"They interviewed the young adults and asked them the events and to tell them more details about them, but they also asked about events that never actually happened," Dr Ecker said.

"The events might be a trip on hot air balloon or being lost at the mall.

"Then they asked that young adult to try and re-live that experience, think back to it, remember it.

"It turns out about a third of people actually develop false memories.

"They imagine these things and they think they are remembering it."

A further 20 per cent accepted a false event had actually happened to them, but did not develop a false memory.

Finding 'lost' memories

The consequences of the study could be greatest for court cases, where great weight is placed on eyewitness evidence, sometimes years after an event has occurred.

It also has implications for psychotherapy and attempts to recover so-called 'lost' memories.

"People can forget traumatic events from their childhood and then remember them again, but the evidence says these memories usually come back spontaneously without the person trying," Dr Ecker said.

"If you are trying to work towards recovering a lost memory, that is often when you get these false memories."