There has been some recent and growing interest in the continuity and discontinuity of cognition between clinical and non-clinical populations. In particular, whilst some researchers have addressed these topics to call into question some normative standards of rationality typically used in the literature (Hertwig and Volz 2013), others have pointed to the alleged presence of imperfect cognitions in both mentally ill and healthy subjects to argued that no effective demarcation between normal and abnormal cognition can be achieved and to combat the stigma associated with mental health (Sullivan Bissett et al. 2016). Research on confabulation is of obvious interest in this context. Confabulation is a symptom central to many psychiatric diagnoses. It was originally discussed in the context of patients with Korsakoff syndrome with severe amnesia, who would report as memories events that either did not happen or had happened much earlier in the patient’s life (Hirstein 2005), but has also been associated with chronic alcohol consumption, posterior circulation stroke, traumatic brain injury, tutors, and schizophrenia (Schnider 2008, 75). Recently, it has been argued that confabulatory phenomena also occur in non-clinical contexts (Coltheart 2017; Wheatley 2009). In particular, Fiery Cushman (2011) argued that the concept of confabulation that is  typically used in the context of neurological patients and clinical populations should also be used in non-clinical contexts and to refer to the explanations of our own behavior that we typically provide, which are sometimes wholly fabricated, and certainly never complete. Philosophers have also started to write quite extensively on the topic of confabulation in non-clinical contexts (Sullivan-Bissett 2015; Balsvik 2017; Carruthers 2012; Mihailov 2016; Sandis 2015; Strijbos and De  Bruin 2015). Nevertheless, whilst confabulatory phenomena have been reported in both clinical and non-clinical contexts, some scholars have argued that clinical confabulation is more severe and involves a lesser degree of truthfulness (Mihailov 2016), and that can be more debilitating to those who exhibit the symptom, "leading to estrangement from family and friends" (Wheatley 2009, 21). 

As it turns out, however, addressing the issue of continuity of confabulatory phenomena is less easy business as it might seem at first. Berlyne lamented that the concept of confabulation has been "poorly defined and variously interpreted" (1972, 31), and after several decades the concern seems still valid: the concept has been used liberally and to refer to various collections of inaccurate statements, which have been classified according to the mode of elicitation (spontaneous vs. provoked), their content (fantastic vs. plausible), the domain in which they become manifest (memory, perception, action and emotion) as well as their stability and selectivity (stable vs. ephemeral), thus leading one to wonder whether this should be best conceived of as a unitary construct or a somewhat arbitrarily selected hodgepodge of phenomena. Concerns over the heterogeneity of clinical phenomena go beyond the case of confabulation (e.g., Samuels 2009), but the case of confabulation is particularly interesting. If the concept of confabulation has been defined too liberally and used to refer to heterogeneous phenomena, it might be that phenomena displayed by clinical and non-clinical populations are actually not analogous. This paper systematically addresses both the liberality of the definitions used in clinical and non-clinical research on confabulation and the types of phenomena reported as confabulatory in clinical and non-clinical contexts.