Individual differences in false memory from misinformation: Cognitive factors

Abstract

This research investigated the cognitive correlates of false memories that are induced by the misinformation paradigm. A large sample of Chinese college students (N=436) participated in a misinformation procedure and also took a battery of cognitive tests. Results revealed sizable and systematic individual differences in false memory arising from exposure to misinformation. False memories were significantly and negatively correlated with measures of intelligence (measured with Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices and Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale), perception (Motor-Free Visual Perception Test, Change Blindness, and Tone Discrimination), memory (Wechsler Memory Scales and 2-back Working Memory tasks), and face judgement (Face Recognition and Facial Expression Recognition). These findings suggest that people with relatively low intelligence and poor perceptual abilities might be more susceptible to the misinformation effect.

Keywords:

• Misinformation
• False memory
• Individual differences
• Cognitive factors

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by The 111 Project from the Ministry of Education of China. We thank Yoko Okado and Craig Stark for sharing their slides with us and for their valuable input. We are also grateful to the members of several of our labs for their contributions to this study.

Notes

¹As part of a larger research project, the participants in the current study also completed many other tests. Due to the current focus of this paper (i.e., false memory from misinformation), we do not report these tests here, but they can be found in the dissertation of Zhu (2010).

²It should be noted that by correcting for multiple comparisons, our results were statistically conservative because the same correlations can also be corrected for attenuation due to less-than-perfect reliability of the measures (Jensen, 1998). If both corrections (multiple comparisons and adjustment for reliability attenuation) were used, the corrected results would be virtually the same as the original results.