Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, 100 Fuqua Dr, Durham, NC, 27708, USA.
Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2022 Oct;29(5):1997-2007. doi: 10.3758/s13423-022-02101-4. Epub 2022 Apr 27.
Much of our day is spent mind-wandering-periods of inattention characterized by a lack of awareness of external stimuli and information. Whether we are paying attention or not, information surrounds us constantly-some true and some false. The proliferation of false information in news and social media highlights the critical need to understand the psychological mechanisms underlying our beliefs about what is true. People often rely on heuristics to judge the truth of information. For example, repeated information is more likely to be judged as true than new information (i.e., the illusory truth effect). However, despite the prevalence of mind wandering in our daily lives, current research on the contributing factors to the illusory truth effect have largely ignored periods of inattention as experimentally informative. Here, we aim to address this gap in our knowledge, investigating whether mind wandering during initial exposure to information has an effect on later belief in the truth of that information. That is, does the illusory truth effect occur even when people report not paying attention to the information at hand. Across three studies we demonstrate that even during periods of mind wandering, the repetition of information increases truth judgments. Further, our results suggest that the severity of mind wandering moderated truth ratings, such that greater levels of mind wandering decreased truth judgements for previously presented information.
我们一天中的大部分时间都在进行思维漫游——即注意力不集中的时期，其特征是对外界刺激和信息缺乏意识。无论我们是否在注意，信息都在不断地围绕着我们——有些是真实的，有些是虚假的。虚假信息在新闻和社交媒体中的泛滥突出表明，我们必须理解我们对真实信息的信念背后的心理机制。人们经常依靠启发式来判断信息的真实性。例如，重复的信息比新信息更有可能被判断为真实的（即虚幻的真实效应）。然而，尽管在我们的日常生活中思维漫游很普遍，但目前关于虚幻真实效应的促成因素的研究在很大程度上忽略了注意力不集中的时期，因为这些时期在实验中提供了有价值的信息。在这里，我们旨在弥补这一知识空白，研究在信息首次呈现期间的思维漫游是否会对人们随后对该信息真实性的信念产生影响。也就是说，即使人们报告没有注意到手头的信息，虚幻的真实效应是否仍然会发生。在三项研究中，我们证明了即使在思维漫游期间，信息的重复也会增加对真实性的判断。此外，我们的研究结果表明，思维漫游的严重程度调节了真实性评价，即思维漫游程度越高，对先前呈现的信息的真实性判断越低。
