Research
what are we studying?
In the Memory and Misinformation Lab we are interested in understanding how the brain supports our ability to form generalized semantic memories and how those memories impact decision-making. In today’s world of rampant social media consumption and ease of access to information it is becoming increasingly difficult to separate fact from fiction.
The primary focus of our lab is to examine how we process misinformation we frequently encounter online, in personal conversations, and on social media. We use functional MRI (fMRI) and behavioral experiments to study the neural mechanisms that support the continued influence of misinformation, different cognitive factors that contribute to how we process misinformation, and ways in which we can better process retractions to reduce the impact misinformation has on future decision-making.
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Projects
Category Learning & Memory Generalization
The ability to link details across our various experiences and form generalized memory representations is a hallmark of healthy memory function. When we learn categories we tend to perceive items within the same category as more physically similar to one another than items across category boundaries. We study how this type of learning is implemented in the brain which also may inform our understanding of biases and how they emerge even in the absence of explicit awareness.
Neural Mechanisms of Misinformation Processing
There are several mechanistic theories for why misinformation continues to influence our decisions even after we know that information is incorrect. One idea is that we store a memory representation for the misinformation the first time we learn it and then when we learn a retraction we poorly integrate those memories together. Another idea is that we store memory representations for misinformation and retractions separately and our failure to make decisions based off the correct information is due to a failure to retrieve the correct memory. We are examining evidence for either or both of these theories using functional neuroimaging and neural pattern analyses.
Misinformation & Social Media
Estimates indicate that around 62% of American’s are getting their news from social media outlets and encounters with news information on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube are often unsolicited. Further, there has also been an increasing trend for factually incorrect information presented online to be believed. We are interested in understanding how the social media presentation of misinformation impacts our memories and ability to learn and encode retractions. We use neuroimaging and behavioral methods to understand how the social media style of presentation interacts with the continued influence of misinformation.