The Role And Neural Mechanism Of Information Relevance In The Persistent Effect Of Misinformation

In the new media era,the study found that misinformation often affects inferences and judgments even after it has been retracted.This phenomenon is known as the continued-influence effect of misinformation(CIEM).Researching and focusing on the CIEM is helpful to reduce the negative effects of misinformation.Currently,few studies have focused on the CIEM of different types of misinformation,especially the different relevance.So the lack of ecological validity because the type of information may be relatively single.Moreover,the relevance between information and individual may be an important factor to be considered in the CIEM research.In previous studies,different retractions were scattered in various studies.To our knowledge,no studies have investigated the effects of different retractions on the CIEM under the same experimental environment and experimental materials,especially the effects of different retractions on the CIEM of different relevance.Furthermore,there are few neural mechanism studies and there is a great deal of divergence between the results,and the related theoretical hypotheses are not fully supported by the experimental results.Thus,the current study designed four series of studies,using the combination of questionnaire and experimental methods to explore the role of information relevance in the CIEM and its neural mechanism from the aspects of behavior and cognitive neuroscience,respectively.Study 1 investigated the influence of relevance on the CIEM by questionnaire and experiment.The results revealed that the CIEM was different with information relevance.Compared with the low self-related information,participants were more reliance on the initial misinformation in high-relevant information,indicating that the CIEM was larger.Study 2 investigated the relationship between the misinformation relevance and retraction manipulation in order to find out how to minimize the CIEM.Alternative narrative,repeated retractions,pre-exposure warnings and retraction source credibility were used in different sub-studies,and the above experiments were analyzed by a mini meta-analysis.The results showed that the information relevance can affect the CIEM,and no matter what retraction was adopted,it was easier to retract high-relevant misinformation.That is,there was a smaller CIEM.This may be because high-relevant information was more closely related to participants and then easier to retract it.Study 3 adopt the retraction(alternative explanation and high authority retraction)which can minimize the CIEM based on the study 2,to investigate of retraction timing of different retraction and relevance in order to increase ecological validity of the experimental results as much as possible.The results found that the CIEM of high relevance was to be small and the retraction effect was obviously poor when delaying a retraction by a week.We should take into account the corresponding effective retraction timing when using different retractions.Where for the alternative explanation under the immediate and delayed one day retraction effect was the same,while the best retraction timing for high authority source was delayed one day.Study 4 mainly discussed the internal neural mechanism of relevance influence the CIEM.The brain imaging meta-analysis found that the prefrontal cortex and temporal cortex may be involved in the processing of the CIEM.After that,a task-f MRI based on the ROI analysis further revealed that in the left middle temporal gyrus related to the text information encoding processing at encoding phase under the low-relevant retraction condition was significantly weaker than that of the control condition;and no significant activation between the conditions was found under high relevance.In the retrieval phase,the left dorsolateral prefrontal,left middle frontal gyrus and right anterior cingulate gyrus associated with inhibition,it was found that the activation degree was relatively weaker under low-relevant retraction condition compared with control condition.No significant activation between the high-relevant conditions was also found.The results of the multivoxel pattern analysis indicated that there were no conditional differences between brain regions in the spatial distribution patterns of voxel activation.The analysis of brain functional connectivity with low-relevant information found no significant functional connectivity found in the left middle temporal gyrus of the encoding phase.The retrieval phase revealed a weaker functional connectivity between the right anterior cingulate cortex and the bilateral inferior occipital gyrus under the retraction condition compared to the control condition,while the right anterior cingulate cortex and the left inferior occipital gyrus were also causal connectivity.It's also showed decreased connectivity with the left middle frontal gyrus and the bilateral inferior occipital gyrus for retraction compared to control;while increased functional connectivity with the left middle frontal gyrus and the right precentral gyrus for retraction compared to control.In sum,this research found that information relevance was an important factor affecting the CIEM,and this effect will be affected by material form and number of sentences.The high-relevant misinformation in discourse was easier to retract(i.e.,the smaller CIEM),which not affected by the different retractions.Different retractions correspond to their appropriate retraction time points and retraction effect decrease when the retraction was presented for a long time interval.The f MRI results suggested that the occurrence of CIEM may be related with both semantic encoding failure during information comprehension and inhibition failure of misinformation retrieval during information retrieval.The hypothesis of mental-model-updating and memory-retrieval-failure may explain the different phases of the CIEM formation.Meanwhile,the cognitive processing mechanism of the information with different relevance may also be different.To some extent,the results extend information types of materials,enrich the influencing factors of the CIEM and resolve the theoretical divergence of previous studies.Moreover,this study further enriches the existing theoretical explanations from the dimension of information relevance,proving that theoretical hypotheses of the CIEM has a variability in processing pathways in situations with different relevance.