Examining the role of information integration in the continued influence effect using an event segmentation approach

Abstract

Misinformation regarding the cause of an event often continues to influence an individual’s event-related reasoning, even after they have received a retraction. This is known as the continued influence effect (CIE). Dominant theoretical models of the CIE have suggested the effect arises primarily from failures to retrieve the correction. However, recent research has implicated information integration and memory updating processes in the CIE. As a behavioural test of integration, we applied an event segmentation approach to the CIE paradigm. Event segmentation theory suggests that incoming information is parsed into distinct events separated by event boundaries, which can have implications for memory. As such, when an individual encodes an event report that contains a retraction, the presence of event boundaries should impair retraction integration and memory updating, resulting in an enhanced CIE. Experiments 1 and 2 employed spatial event segmentation boundaries in an attempt to manipulate the ease with which a retraction can be integrated into a participant’s mental event model. While Experiment 1 showed no impact of an event boundary, Experiment 2 yielded evidence that an event boundary resulted in a reduced CIE. To the extent that this finding reflects enhanced retrieval of the retraction relative to the misinformation, it is more in line with retrieval accounts of the CIE.

Examining the Reproducibility of Temporal Event Boundaries in Continued Influence Effect and Event Segmentation Paradigms

“…Following a failure of Sanderson et al (2022) to find any obvious effect of boundaries in the expected direction on susceptibility to misinformation, rather than investigating the potential effects of temporal event segmentation on information integration and continued influence in a CIE paradigm, the present research aimed to reproduce previously reported effects of temporal event boundaries on memory directly. In order to achieve this, we manipulated the presence of temporal event boundaries, and measured how event boundaries affected participants' memory.…”

“…This paper follows from a previous study by Sanderson et al (2022), which investigated the effect of spatial event segmentation boundaries on information integration and updating in a continued influence effect (CIE) paradigm. The continued influence effect refers to the finding that people often continue to rely on misinformation in their eventrelated reasoning, even after the information has been retracted.…”

“…The current study investigated the effect of temporal event segmentation boundaries on memory. This follows from Sanderson et al (2022) who applied an event segmentation approach to the CIE paradigm as a behavioural test of information integration and updating. Specifically, Sanderson et al manipulated the presence of spatial event boundaries between the encoding of misinformation and a retraction, and found no evidence of a detrimental effect of spatial event boundaries on retraction integration.…”