I skimmed through the paper, but don't LLMs most of the time guess, sometimes these guesses contains noise that might be on point or not. I wonder if "confabulation" had a more formal definition.
"Confabulations are inaccurate or false narratives purporting to convey information about world or self. It is the received view that they are uttered by subjects intent on ‘covering up’ for a putative memory deficit."
It seems that there is a clear memory deficit about the incident, so the subject "makes stuff up", knowingly or unknowingly.
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cited from:
German E. Berrios, "Confabulations: A Conceptual History", Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, Volume 7, 1998 - Issue 3
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1076/jhin.7.3.225.185...
DOI: 10.1076/jhin.7.3.225.1855