Electrophysiological correlates of the continued influence effect of misinformation: an exploratory study

ABSTRACT

Misinformation often affects inferential reasoning even after it has been retracted, known as the continued influence effect (CIE). Previous behavioural research into the effect’s underlying mechanisms has focussed on the role of long-term memory processes at the time misinformation is retrieved during inferential reasoning. We present the first investigation into the CIE using event-related potentials (ERPs). Participants completed a continued-influence task whilst electroencephalographic data were recorded. Analysis was guided by previous ERP research investigating post-event misinformation effects. ERPs elicited for retracted misinformation were more negative at a frontal-midline region of interest (300–500 ms) and more positive at a left-parietal region (450–600 ms) compared to correctly-accepted true information, though no differences were observed between rejected and accepted misinformation. This suggests that post-retraction reliance on misinformation may be driven by particularly strong recollection of the misinformation, ostensibly following poor integration of the retraction into the initial, partially invalid mental model.

KEYWORDS:

• Continued influence effect
• misinformation
• memory updating
• retrieval
• ERP

Data availability

The raw data are available at https://osf.io/kmf2a/ (doi: 10.17605/OSF.IO/KMF2A).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 These results were very similar when all 47 participants were included in the behavioural analyses.

2 This analysis was attempted with the current sample, but no between-conditions differences were observed.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported the Australian Research Council under Grant DP160103596 awarded to the last author.