Recalling fake news during real news corrections can impair or enhance memory updating: the role of recollection-based retrieval

Abstract

Fake news can impair memory leading to societal controversies such as COVID-19 vaccine efficacy. The pernicious influence of fake news is clear when ineffective corrections leave memories outdated. A key theoretical issue is whether people should recall fake news while reading corrections with contradictory details. The familiarity backfire view proposes that recalling fake news increases its familiarity, leading to interference. However, the integrative encoding view proposes that recalling fake news promotes co-activation and binding of contradictory details, leading to facilitation. Two experiments examined if one theory better accounts for memory updating after participants recalled actual fake news details when reading headlines that corrected misinformation. In Phase 1, participants read real and fake news headlines of unclear veracity taken from various internet sources. In Phase 2, participants read real news headlines that reaffirmed real news and corrected fake news from Phase 1. When they detected that Phase 2 real news corrected fake news, they attempted to recall Phase 1 fake news. In Phase 3, participants first recalled real news details. When they remembered that those details were corrections from Phase 2, they attempted to recall fake news from Phase 1. Recalling fake news when noticing corrections in Phase 2 led to better memory for real news in Phase 3 when fake news was recalled again and worse memory for real news in Phase 3 when fake news was not recalled again. Both views explain part of the memory differences associated with recalling fake news during corrections, but only when considering whether people recollected that fake news had been corrected.