'I saw it with my own eyes' is something people often say. The implication is that since we perceived something, it must have happened.
by a great many things, and a strange new experiment shows just how easily our perceptions can be manipulated by our own expectations and assumptions., scientists discovered a"novel perceptual illusion" that effectively reorders the perceived temporal order of events in a sequence.
In a series of experiments, the researchers showed over 600 participants an animation in which a seemingly simple 'ABC' chain of events appears to take place: an A square collides with a B square, which in turn collides with a C square. One explanation for the phenomenon is that people may be misremembering what occurred when they later retrieve the memory after seeing the chain of events – what researchers labelled the 'memory hypothesis'.