Individual Differences in Susceptibility to Misinformation Effects and Hindsight Bias

Intrinsic functional connectivity in medial temporal lobe networks is associated with susceptibility to misinformation

Memory is notoriously fallible and susceptible to misinformation. Yet little is known about the underlying cognitive and neural mechanisms that render individuals vulnerable to this type of false memory. The current experiments take an individual differences approach to examine whether susceptibility to misinformation reflects stable underlying factors related to memory retrieval. In Study 1, we report for the first time the existence of substantial individual variability in susceptibility to misinformation in the context of repeated memory retrieval, when the misinformation effect is most pronounced. This variability was not related to an individual's tendency to adopt an episodic retrieval style during remembering (trait mnemonics). In Study 2, we next examined whether susceptibility to misinformation is related to intrinsic functional connectivity in medial temporal lobe (MTL) networks known to coordinate memory reactivation during event retrieval. Stronger resting-state functional connectivity between the MTL and cortical areas associated with visual memory reactivation (occipital cortex) was associated with better protection from misinformation. Together, these results reveal that while memory distortion is a universal property of our reconstructive memory system, susceptibility to misinformation varies at the individual level and may depend on one's ability to reactivate visual details during memory retrieval.

Who is susceptible in three false memory tasks?

Decades of research show that people are susceptible to developing false memories. But if they do so in one task, are they likely to do so in a different one? The answer: "No". In the current research, a large number of participants took part in three well-established false memory paradigms (a misinformation task, the Deese-Roediger-McDermott [DRM] list learning paradigm, and an imagination inflation exercise) as well as completed several individual difference measures. Results indicate that many correlations between false memory variables in all three inter-paradigm comparisons are null, though some small, positive, significant correlations emerged. Moreover, very few individual difference variables significantly correlated with false memories, and any significant correlations were rather small. It seems likely, therefore, that there is no false memory "trait". In other words, no one type of person seems especially prone, or especially resilient, to the ubiquity of memory distortion.

The misinformation effect is unrelated to the DRM effect with and without a DRM warning

The misinformation and Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigms are used to study forms of false memories. Despite the abundance of research using these two paradigms, few studies have examined the relationship between the errors that arise from them. In the present study, 160 participants completed a misinformation task and two DRM tasks, receiving a warning about the effect before the second DRM task. Participants demonstrated misinformation and DRM effects (with and without the warning), but susceptibility to these forms of false memory were not significantly related across individuals. The DRM warning reduced the DRM effect, and signal detection analysis revealed that the DRM warning reduced a liberal response bias in this task. Sensitivity and response bias in both DRM tasks were not significantly related to these measures in the misinformation task. These findings suggest that these two forms of false memories are not interchangeable and they appear to be the result of different cognitive processes.