EVENT: Psychology Colloquium: Briony Swire-Thompson: "Correcting misinformation and the familiarity backfire effect." & Luke Strickland: "A Linear Ballistic Accumulator Model of Event-based Prospective Memory"

Psychology Colloquium: The colloquium this week features two presentations from the recent Australasian Experimental Psychology Conference.

Presenter 1: Briony Swire-Thompson

Briony is a PhD candidate with the Cognitive Psychology Laboratories. Under the supervision of Dr. Ullrich Ecker and Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, her research investigates how people process misinformation. She won a 2015 Fullbright Postgraduate Scholarship, and will commence her placement at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in August.

Title: Correcting misinformation and the familiarity backfire effect

ABSTRACT

People continue to use information in their reasoning even after they have been explicitly told that the information is not true. Ironically, under some circumstances, a retraction can even lead to an individual increasing their belief in the very misconception the retraction is attempting to correct; this is know as a backfire effect. It has previously been assumed that the repetition of the misconception within the retraction partially accounts for this phenomenon, as the myth's repetition will inadvertently make the myth more familiar. The present studies investigated whether increased familiarity does lead to a backfire effect in undergraduate (study 1)and older adult populations (Study 2). Participants rated their belief in various statements of unclear veracity. Facts were subsequently affirmed and myths were retracted. Participants then re-rated their belief either immediately or after a delay. Results indicate that over the course of one week, affirmations of facts led to sustained belief change yet the retraction of myths led to only temporary belief change. However, participants' belief in the myths never exceeded pre-manipulation belief levels. This absence of a backfire effect suggests that increased familiarity alone does not lead to an inadvertent strengthening of misconceptions.

Presenter 2: Luke Strickland

Luke is currently completing the 4th year of his PhD, working with his supervisors Associate Professor Shayne Loft and Professor Andrew Heathcote. His research focuses on the cognitive mechanisms underlying how people remember to perform deferred intended actions, which is a common task in everyday life, e.g. remember to slow down when driving through a school zone.

Title: A Linear Ballistic Accumulator Model of Event-based Prospective Memory

ABSTRACT

Event-based prospective memory (PM) tasks require participants to substitute an atypical PM response for more routine ongoing task responses when presented with targets. We fit the Linear Ballistic Accumulator model (LBA) to an event-based PM task to predict the RT distributions and accuracies of both ongoing task responses and PM responses. The LBA model assumes that, upon stimulus presentation, evidence for completing responses accumulates, and that the first response to reach a threshold of evidence is made. In Experiment 1, PM accuracy was lower and non-target trial response times (RTs) were slower under nonfocal PM conditions compared to focal PM conditions. In Experiment 2, PM accuracy was higher and non-target trial RT's were slower when participants were told that the PM task was important. LBA model fits indicated that the effects of focality and importance on PM accuracy were due to a shift in threshold to make PM responses, rather than a shift in the level of moment-to-moment PM task response-relevant processing. Differences in non-target trial RT's between conditions were due to an increased threshold to make ongoing task responses. These findings disagree with the theories of PM, which propose that differences in PM demands cause shifts in resource allocation.