Changing beliefs about past public events with believable and unbelievable doctored photographs

Abstract

Doctored photographs can shape what people believe and remember about prominent public events, perhaps due to their apparent credibility. In three studies, subjects completed surveys about the 2012 London Olympic torch relay (Experiment 1) or the 2011 Royal Wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton (Experiments 2-3). Some were shown a genuine photo of the event; others saw a doctored photo that depicted protesters and unrest. A third group of subjects saw a doctored photo whose inauthenticity had been made explicit, either by adding a written disclaimer (Experiment 1) or by making the digital manipulation deliberately poor (Experiments 2-3). In all three studies, doctored photos had small effects on a subset of subjects' beliefs about the events. Of central interest though, comparable effects also emerged when the photos were overtly inauthentic. These findings suggest that cognitive mechanisms other than credibility - such as familiarity misattribution and mental imagery - can rapidly influence beliefs about past events even when the low credibility of a source is overt.

Can people detect errors in shadows and reflections?

“…The rise of photo manipulation paired with people’s apparent insensitivity to such manipulation has consequences across myriad domains, from law enforcement (when photos are used as evidence in court) through to politics (when photos are used to promote a political agenda). Moreover, research shows that doctored photos (and videos) can influence people’s beliefs, memories, intentions and behaviors (e.g., Nash, 2017; Sacchi, Agnoli, & Loftus, 2007; Wade, Garry, Read, & Lindsay, 2002; Wade, Green, & Nash, 2010). The current research does not provide a solution to the complex problem of how to detect image forgeries, but the results suggest that people might frequently neglect potentially useful cues in images.…”

Fool me twice: how effective is debriefing in false memory studies?

“…One such area of study is the effect of 'fake news', and many studies have attempted to plant false memories for fabricated political events (e.g. Frenda et al, 2013;Murphy et al 2019;Nash, 2018;Saachi et al, 2007). A 2018 meta-analysis showed that misinformation related to real-world events is more challenging to correct than constructed misinformation (e.g., referring to a fictional crime), and that misinformation pertaining to politics is especially resistant to retraction (Walter & Murphy, 2018).…”

Scene Perception

“…In recent years, interest has grown in how information processing across depth impacts attention and memory of scene representations (Bonner & Epstein, , 2018Josephs & Konkle, 2019;Man et al, 2019). Traditionally, studies of depth perception have examined observers' estimates of distance (Cutting & Vishton, 1995;Nagata, 1991) and how information at different distances is processed: from peripersonal to vista space (Costantini et al, 2011;Cutting & Vishton, 1995;Previc, 1998).…”

“…Recent studies on scene processing have also shown qualitatively different processing of spaces closer to the observer (Bonner & Epstein, 2017, 2018Fernandes & Castelhano, 2021;Josephs & Konkle, 2019;Man et al, 2019). Most recently, Castelhano and Fernandes (2021) found a foreground bias when examining rapid scene perception for images that had mismatched scene categories in the foreground and background (i.e., chimera scenes).…”