Marloes van Moort: Familiar false facts vs. novel truths

Familiar false facts vs. novel truths: The influence of readers’ background knowledge on processing and acquiring false information

I will present an ERP study that investigates how conceptual knowledge supports comprehension and learning (i.e., a familiarity effect) and protects against accepting false information (i.e., false information effect) both during learning and during later memory retrieval. In this study we employed a learning paradigm in which readers are presented with short texts containing knowledge ‘facts’ about familiar or unfamiliar concepts (e.g., penguins vs. godwits) that could be either true or false. Participants were instructed to read the texts carefully and try to remember the content of the texts. They were told that they would be tested on the content of the texts, regardless of its accuracy. During the acquisition phase of the experiment the facts were presented twice. Shortly after learning, we tested their text recognition memory. We combined the collection of behavioral measures that provide information on whether the (in)accurate information is consolidated in memory with event-related potentials (ERPs) that provide complementary information on how knowledge affects readers’ moment-by-moment processing of texts containing false information during learning.

Watch the talk via Teams:

https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_NmQ3ZTc3MDItMzFiMS00N2MwLTg3ZDgtOGQyYTI2YmMyMjU3%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22d72758a0-a446-4e0f-a0aa-4bf95a4a10e7%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%2283c475af-f9dc-4c5e-80f5-e3f3e2e17adc%22%7d

Join via Teams Calendar:

Meeting ID: 376 421 912 630
Passcode: tJQTnF