Search PubMed⌕ Search

SEARCH · Search PubMed

Results for “Misinformation”

Search indexed PubMed citations on genomics, clinical trials, systematic reviews and public health. Explore titles, authors and supplied subject terms, then open the PubMed record.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2003

Misinformation effects in eyewitness memory: the presence and absence of memory impairment as a function of warning and misinformation accessibility.

The authors report 5 experiments investigating how exposure to misleading postevent information affects people's ability to remember details from a witnessed event. In each experiment the authors tested memory using the modified opposition test, which was designed to isolate retrieval-blocking effects. The findings indicate that retrieval blocking occurs regardless of whether the misleading information is presented before or after the witnessed event. In addition, when people are warned immediately about the presence of misleading information, they can counteract retrieval-blocking effects but only if the misinformation is relatively low in accessibility. The authors discuss the findings in terms of the retrieval-blocking hypothesis and a hypothetical suppression mechanism that can counteract retrieval-blocking effects in some circumstances.

Attention↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Neural activity during encoding predicts false memories created by misinformation.

False memories are often demonstrated using the misinformation paradigm, in which a person's recollection of a witnessed event is altered after exposure to misinformation about the event. The neural basis of this phenomenon, however, remains unknown. We used fMRI to investigate encoding processes during the viewing of an event and misinformation to see whether neural activity during either encoding phase could predict what would be remembered. fMRI data were collected as participants studied eight vignettes (Original Event phase). Shortly afterward, participants studied the same vignettes during scanning, but with changes to several details, serving as the misinformation (Misinformation phase). Two days later, their memories for the Original Event were assessed. Activity that subsequently led to true and false memories was examined during both encoding phases. Two interaction patterns between encoding phase (Original Event and Misinformation) and type of memory (true and false) were observed in MTL and PFC regions. In the left hippocampus tail and perirhinal cortex, a predictive item-encoding pattern was observed. During the Original Event phase, activity was greater for true than false memories, whereas during the Misinformation phase, activity was greater for false than true memories. In other regions, a pattern suggestive of source encoding was observed, in which activity for false memories was greater during the Original Event phase than the Misinformation phase. Together, these results suggest that encoding processes play a critical role in determining true and false memory outcome in misinformation paradigms.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1989

Influences of misleading postevent information: misinformation interference and acceptance.

Because of the biasing nature of retrieval tests, evidence that the introduction of misleading postevent information will impair the memory for an original event has recently been in dispute. In two experiments, a retrieval test sensitive to both biasing effects of misinformation (misinformation acceptance) and influences of the misinformation on memory (misinformation interference) was used. Both experiments demonstrated misinformation acceptance, and one of the experiments suggested that misinformation interferes with the ability to remember the original event. Two misinformation interference hypotheses are evaluated; they suggest that the misinformation may have either impaired memory or led to confusion regarding what had occurred during the event.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2006

Position of the American Dietetic Association: food and nutrition misinformation.

It is the position of the American Dietetic Association (ADA) that food and nutrition misinformation can have harmful effects on the health, well-being, and economic status of consumers. Nationally credentialed dietetics professionals working in health care, academia, public health, the media, government, and the food industry are uniquely qualified to advocate for and promote science-based nutrition information to the public, function as primary nutrition educators to health professionals, and actively correct food and nutrition misinformation. Enormous scientific advances have been made in the area of food and nutrition, leading to a fine-tuning of recommendations about healthful eating. Consumers have become increasingly aware of the nutrition-health link and reliant on nutrition information to base their decisions, and have assumed partial responsibility for changing their eating behaviors. Unfortunately, these same trends also create opportunities for food and nutrition misinformation to flourish. News reports rarely provide enough context for consumers to interpret or apply the advice given, and preliminary findings often attract unmerited and misleading attention. Effective nutrition communication must be consumer-friendly and contain sufficient context to allow consumers to consider the information and determine whether it applies to their unique health and nutritional needs. Consistent with ADA's organizational vision that members "are the leading source of nutrition expertise," ADA recognizes its responsibility to help consumers identify food and nutrition misinformation in the following ways: (a) ADA members should provide consumers with sound, science-based nutrition information and help them to recognize misinformation; (b) ADA members need to be the primary source of sound, science-based nutrition information for the media and to inform them when misinformation is presented; and (c) ADA members should continue to diligently work with other health care practitioners, educators, policy makers, and food and dietary supplement industry representatives to responsibly address the health and psychological, physiological, and economic effects of nutrition-related misinformation.

Communication↗
PubMed2026

Navigating Social Media: Balancing Connectivity With Media Literacy to Combat Misinformation and Protect Mental Well-Being.

BACKGROUND: The pervasive use of social media has created a complex digital ecosystem where high connectivity coexists with significant challenges, including the rapid spread of misinformation, particularly regarding mental health, and documented negative impacts on psychological well-being. Platform architectures designed for engagement maximization have been identified as central factors in both issues. OBJECTIVE: This paper critically analyzes the interconnected relationships between social media use, misinformation dissemination, and mental health impacts, with particular attention to psychiatric misinformation across diagnostic categories (e.g., depression, anxiety, ADHD). A primary objective is to evaluate the potential of advanced critical digital literacy frameworks to serve as protective mechanisms against these dual threats. METHODS: A systematic search was conducted following PRISMA 2020 guidelines across APA PsycInfo, PubMed, JSTOR, and Google Scholar for literature published between January 2018 and March 2026 (updated from the original 2023 search). The search yielded 2672 records. After removing 624 duplicates, 2048 records underwent title and abstract screening, with 1802 excluded. The remaining 246 full-text articles were assessed for eligibility, resulting in 86 studies included in the final qualitative synthesis. Inter-rater reliability was established (Cohen's κ = 0.82). Quality assessment was conducted using the Joanna Briggs Institute Checklist, AXIS, and CASP tools, with findings weighted by methodological quality. A thematic analysis was undertaken to synthesize findings. RESULTS: The analysis reveals that core architectural features of social media platforms, algorithmic curation and engagement-based metrics, simultaneously foster environments ripe for misinformation spread and contribute to psychological distress, including anxiety, depression, and harmful social comparison. Psychiatric misinformation specifically (e.g., inaccurate claims about treatment effectiveness, diagnostic criteria, and medication side effects) represents a growing concern, particularly on image- and video-based platforms. The findings indicate that conventional media literacy approaches focused solely on fact-checking are insufficient. Instead, a critical digital literacy framework encompassing algorithmic awareness, data literacy, and emotional awareness is essential for building user resilience, with evidence from high-quality systematic reviews supporting this approach. CONCLUSIONS: Navigating the complexities of modern social media requires an integrated approach combining "pedagogies of play" for experiential skill development with advocacy for structural change (e.g., algorithmic transparency, well being by design principles). This dual strategy empowers individual users to critically engage with digital content while advocating for ethical platform design, thereby safeguarding both mental well-being and democratic discourse. Implications for educators, mental health professionals (including competencies for addressing patient encounters with psychiatric misinformation), policymakers, and platform designers are discussed.

Humans↗
PubMed1995

Position of the American Dietetic Association: food and nutrition misinformation.

Food and nutrition experts, including ADA members, need to take an active role in helping consumers recognize misinformation. The challenge of dealing with food and nutrition misinformation is long-standing and persistent. However, qualified dietetics professionals, in partnership with other members of the health-care team, educators, and representatives of the food industry, can be a forceful voice against food and nutrition misinformation. Qualified dietetics professionals can positively shape the food choices of Americans by collaborating with the media to communicate balanced nutrition information to consumers and to counter misinformation; writing letters to the editors of newspapers and magazines to counter inaccurate and biased articles; calling television and radio shows that interview nutrition extremists and purveyors of misinformation to express their professional concerns; directing the news media and consumers to responsible sources of nutrition information; encouraging researchers to present their results with a balanced perspective; collaborating with the food industry to provide reliable nutrition information; and cooperating with other practitioners to expose emerging misinformation, misbeliefs, frauds, and quackery before they are widely accepted.

Consumer Advocacy↗
PubMed1998

Updating accounts following a correction of misinformation.

The research examined whether corrected misinformation influences anaphoric inferences people make during subsequent reading. Participants read a set of corrected-misinformation and no-misinformation stories and made judgments about probe words that were either appropriate or inappropriate anaphoric referents. At a short delay, the results showed less activation for appropriate referents that were corrections of misinformation. At longer delays, the activation of appropriate referents showed no significant difference, but misinformation probes were more quickly recognized than were inappropriate referents that were incidentally mentioned in control story versions. In all conditions, appropriate referents showed more activation than inappropriate ones. The results suggest that corrected misinformation can continue to influence on-line reading processes.

Adult↗
PubMed2006

Pre-event stereotypes and misinformation effects in young children.

This study examined the effects of pre-event stereotypes on 5-year-old children's memories for the visit of an adult male to their school. Children were read three stories in which this man was described in positive, negative, or neutral terms. Following the visit, children were read post-event narratives which contained positive and negative misinformation that was consistent and inconsistent with the pre-event stereotype. Children were then given a recognition test under inclusion and exclusion instructions. Negative misinformation was correctly rejected more often than positive misinformation. Children given a positive pre-event stereotype were more likely to accept positive misinformation than those in the other stereotype conditions. Process dissociation analyses revealed that recollection for negative misinformation was larger than for positive misinformation; the opposite was the case for familiarity.

Analysis of Variance↗
PubMed1995

Hindsight bias and the misinformation effect: separating blended recollections from other recollection types.

Questioning the presence of "truly" blended recollections, we investigated two cognitive phenomena: hindsight bias and the misinformation effect. At first glance, both phenomena seem to result from the same interference process, whereby the subsequent encoding of conflicting information impairs the recall of earlier encoded (original) material. Experiment 1 compared both paradigms using numerical items as material: hindsight as well as misinformation subjects revealed the same mean shift in their recollection of the original values. The additional analysis of a multinomial model, however, suggested that blended recollections occurred in the hindsight condition only. The misinformation effect, on the other hand, appeared to be based on averaging across two different recollection types. Experiment 2 further investigated how the memory-trace strength influences the likelihood for blended recollections to occur. In a misinformation procedure, one group of subjects read the original information twice, another group thrice. Again, recollections were similarly shifted towards the misinformation in both groups. But the multinomial model revealed that only the second group (with a stronger memory representation of the original information) showed blended recollections. Taken together, these results suggested that: (1) a minimum memory-trace strength of the original information must be met for blended recollections to occur; and (2) hindsight bias and the misinformation effect--though superficially similar--are induced by different cognitive processes.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2005

Planting misinformation in the human mind: a 30-year investigation of the malleability of memory.

The misinformation effect refers to the impairment in memory for the past that arises after exposure to misleading information. The phenomenon has been investigated for at least 30 years, as investigators have addressed a number of issues. These include the conditions under which people are especially susceptible to the negative impact of misinformation, and conversely when are they resistant. Warnings about the potential for misinformation sometimes work to inhibit its damaging effects, but only under limited circumstances. The misinformation effect has been observed in a variety of human and nonhuman species. And some groups of individuals are more susceptible than others. At a more theoretical level, investigators have explored the fate of the original memory traces after exposure to misinformation appears to have made them inaccessible. This review of the field ends with a brief discussion of the newer work involving misinformation that has explored the processes by which people come to believe falsely that they experienced rich complex events that never, in fact, occurred.

Animals↗
PubMed2005

The role of inhibitory control in the production of misinformation effects.

Recent research has indicated a link between retrieval-induced forgetting and the production of misinformation effects (J. Saunders & M. D. MacLeod, 2002). The mechanism underlying this relationship, however, remains unclear. In an attempt to clarify this issue, the authors presented 150 participants with misinformation under conditions designed to promote the activation of inhibitory control during the retrieval of information about a target event. A modified retrieval practice paradigm that used the independent probe method pioneered by M. C. Anderson and B. A. Spellman (1995) revealed that misinformation effects emerged only where misinformation had been introduced about items that had been subject to 1st-order, 2nd-order, or cross-category inhibition. By contrast, misinformation effects failed to emerge where inhibitory processing had not been activated. These findings are discussed in terms of inhibitory control, memory malleability, and their implications for the interviewing of eyewitnesses.

Communication↗
PubMed1997

Overcoming misinformation effects in eyewitness memory: effects of encoding time and event cues.

Eyewitness memory is often distorted when misleading information is presented to subjects after encoding. Three experiments explored ways to overcome these misinformation effects. In Experiment 1, subjects viewed slides of a robbery, at a rate of four or seven seconds per slide. Five minutes later subjects were given a recognition test with few (1-3) or numerous (6-13) event cues. Providing numerous retrieval cues improved overall performance, but did not reduce the effects of misinformation. With week-long delays (Experiment 2) numerous retrieval cues did eliminate misinformation effects, but only when subjects viewed slides at the slower rate (seven seconds per slide). Experiment 3 essentially replicated this pattern, using a modified test to eliminate any biasing effects of distractors. Given adequate encoding and numerous retrieval cues, misinformation effects were eliminated, suggesting that under some conditions misinformation makes event memory inaccessible, but not unavailable.

Crime↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Reducing misinformation effects in children with cognitive interviews: dissociating recollection and familiarity.

Two experiments examined the effect of a cognitive interview on 4- and 8-year-old children's correct recall and subsequent reporting of misinformation. Children viewed an event followed by misinformation that was read or self-generated either before or after a cognitive interview. Children were then given a recognition test under inclusion and exclusion instructions. A cognitive interview elicited more correct details than a control interview. Age-related changes were found such that the 8-year-old children's reports were more complete and they recalled more correct person, action, object, and location details than the 4-year-old children. A cognitive interview given after postevent misinformation reduced children's reporting of misinformation at interview and reduced reporting of self-generated misinformation at test. Process dissociation analyses revealed that recollection increased but familiarity decreased with age.

Child↗
PubMed1989

Misinformation and memory: the creation of new memories.

Misleading information presented after an event can lead people to erroneous reports of that misinformation. Different process histories can be responsible for the same erroneous report in different people. We argue that the relative proportion of times that the different process histories are responsible for erroneous reporting will depend on the conditions of acquisition, retention, and retrieval of information. Given the conditions typical of most misinformation experiments, it appears that misinformation acceptance plays a major role, memory impairment plays some role, and pure guessing plays little or no role. Moreover, we argue that misinformation acceptance has not received the appreciation that it deserves as a phenomenon worthy of our sustained investigation. It may not tell us anything about impairment of memories, but it does tell us something about the creation of new memories.

Attention↗
PubMed2002

Why misinformation is more likely to be recognised over time: A source monitoring account.

Although memory for actual events tends to be forgotten over time, memory for misinformation tends to be retrieved at a stable rate over long delays or at a rate greater than that found immediately after encoding. To examine whether source monitoring errors contribute to this phenomenon, two experiments investigated subjects' memory for the source of misinformation at different retention intervals. Subjects viewed a slide presentation, read a narrative containing misinformation, and, either 10 minutes or 1 week later, completed a recognition test about details seen in the slides and about the source of these details. After the longer retention interval in both experiments, participants were more likely to agree that they had seen misleading information and were also more likely to incorrectly associate the misinformation with the slide event. Theoretical implications of these findings are considered.

Adult↗
PubMed2005

How eyewitnesses resist misinformation: social postwarnings and the monitoring of memory characteristics.

Previous findings have been equivocal as to whether the postevent misinformation effect on eyewitness memory is reduced by warnings presented after the misinformation (postwarnings). In the present research, social postwarnings, which characterize the postevent source as a low-credibility individual, diminished the misinformation effect in both cued recall and recognition tests. Discrediting the source as being either untrustworthy or incompetent was effective (Experiment 1). Also, postwarned participants rated reality characteristics of their memories more accurately than did participants receiving no or high-credibility information about the postevent source (Experiment 2). A social postwarning yielded the same results as an explicit source-monitoring appeal and led to longer response times for postevent items, relative to a no-warning condition (Experiments 3 and 4). The findings suggest that the reduced misinformation effect was due to more thorough monitoring of memory characteristics by postwarned participants, rather than to a stricter response criterion or to enhanced event memory.

Adult↗
PubMed2000

The quality of false memory over time: is memory for misinformation "remembered" or "known"?

The conscious quality of eyewitness memory for misinformation after different retention intervals was investigated in two experiments. Participants viewed computer-projected slides depicting a crime (encoding phase), read a narrative containing misinformation, and took a recall test about the original event. Remember/know judgments were made for each response. A "remember" judgment indicated that the participant vividly recalled seeing a detail in the encoding phase. A "know" judgment indicated that the participant believed that a detail was presented but did not vividly remember it. Generally, misinformation was more likely to be associated with a know judgment than with a remember judgment after a short retention interval. This outcome suggests that, in many cases, misleading information is judged as having a different subjective quality than memory for actual events. However, over a relatively long retention interval, misinformation that simply added new information about the event was more often judged as remembered.

Adult↗
PubMed1999

Memory strength affects reporting of misinformation.

A model of long-term retention was used to examine whether and how the strength of original information (differences in learning and testing time) and the strength of misleading information (differences in timing and frequency) influence 3- to 5-year-olds' memory for an event. In three experiments, preschoolers viewed a slide presentation depicting an event, some of them were asked misleading questions, and memory for event details was tested. There was little evidence of memory impairment, but exposure to misleading information encouraged reporting of this information. Differences in learning influenced reporting in that children exposed to the event once reported more misled details than those who saw the event multiple times. Furthermore, preschoolers who saw the event once were just as susceptible to misleading information whether exposed to misinformation once or three times; however, preschoolers who had seen the event multiple times were susceptible only to repeated presentations of misinformation. Given that the reporting of misinformation is determined by the degree of integrity of both the original and misleading information, it is important to control for differences in trace strength for both types of information in future research.

Analysis of Variance↗