The piecemeal reporting of unfolding news events can lead to the reporting of mistaken information (or misinformation) about the cause of the newsworthy event, which later needs to be corrected. Studies of the continued influence effect have shown, however, that corrections are not entirely effective in reversing the effects of initial misinformation. Instead, participants continue to rely on t...

People's later memory of an event can be altered by exposure to misinformation about that event. The typical misinformation paradigm, however, does not include a recall test prior to the introduction of misinformation, contrary to what real-life eyewitnesses encounter when they report to a 911 operator or crime-scene officer. Because retrieval is a powerful memory enhancer (the testing effect),...

Information requirements determination (IRD) is concerned with developing accurate requirements for a proposed system, primarily by eliciting information from users and other organizational stakeholders. In this paper we build and test theory concerning a significant threat to the accuracy of information requirements, termed the misinformation effect. Misinformation is distorted, false, or othe...

False memories are often demonstrated using the misinformation paradigm, in which a person's recollection of a witnessed event is altered after exposure to misinformation about the event. The neural basis of this phenomenon, however, remains unknown. We used fMRI to investigate encoding processes during the viewing of an event and misinformation to see whether neural activity during either enco...

Misinformation introduced after events have already occurred causes errors in later retrieval. Based on literature showing that arousal induced after learning enhances delayed retrieval, we investigated whether post-learning arousal can reduce the misinformation effect. 251 participants viewed four short film clips, each followed by a retention test, which for some participants included misinfo...

The widespread prevalence and persistence of misinformation in contemporary societies, such as the false belief that there is a link between childhood vaccinations and autism, is a matter of public concern. For example, the myths surrounding vaccinations, which prompted some parents to withhold immunization from their children, have led to a marked increase in vaccine-preventable disease, as we...

Witness shyness was investigated to determine its effect on eyewitness recall memory and susceptibility to the ‘misinformation effect’. Thirty-nine shy and 41 non-shy participants were exposed to a filmed mock crime. Recall accuracy was assessed via free recall and directed recall. Participants were subsequently asked to read a script containing misinformation. The direct recall questionnaire t...

OBJECTIVES To better understand the effects of misinformation on eyewitnesses of different ages, older and younger adults experienced an event under intentional and incidental learning conditions in a naturalistic experiment using multiple memory tests. METHOD Following exposure to the event, which was a brief interruption of a group testing session, participants completed several memory test...

This research investigated the relationship between false memories induced by two different paradigms (misinformation and Deese-Roediger-McDermott [DRM]). The misinformation effect refers to the phenomenon that a person's recollection of a witnessed event can be altered after exposure to misleading information about the event. DRM false memory represents the intrusion of words that are semantic...

The growth of social media provides a convenient communication scheme for people, but at the same time it becomes a hotbed of misinformation. The wide spread of misinformation over social media is injurious to public interest. We design a framework, which integrates collective intelligence and machine intelligence, to help identify misinformation. The basic idea is: (1) automatically index the ...