Reducing interference from misconceptions: The role of inhibition in knowledge revision.

Abstract

The goal of the present set of experiments was to identify the conditions under which readers evoked prepotent-response inhibition to prevent interference from reactivated misconceptions. In Experiment 1, participants with varying inhibition ability read refutation texts that addressed common misconceptions and control texts. Overall, participants read target sentences that stated the correct idea faster in the refutation texts than in the control texts, suggesting that refutation texts were sufficient to reduce interference from misconceptions and facilitate knowledge revision. In the control texts, participants with higher inhibition ability read target sentences slower than participants with lower inhibition ability, suggesting that participants with higher inhibition ability may have engaged in some extra processing to cope with the interference from misconceptions. In Experiment 2, we used a probe-verification paradigm to evaluate the extent to which readers’ misconceptions were indeed reactivated during reading of the control texts. Results showed no evidence of reactivation in the refutation texts, but misconceptions continued to be reactivated in the control texts. Taken together, these findings suggest that prepotent-response inhibition may be one means by which readers manage interference from reactivated misconceptions from prior knowledge.

The Role of Critical Thinking and Executive Function in Misconceptions in Psychology

“…This finding is in line with previous findings that inhibitory control plays an important role in "misconceptual" issues (Babai et al, 2012;Shtulman & Valcarel, 2012). Inhibitory control is recognized to act as a mechanism used to suppress misconceptions by blocking the dominant but improper response (Mason et al, 2019), helping to reduce or eliminate incorrect concept interference, and facilitating the use of appropriate concepts (Butterfuss & Kendeou, 2020). The results show that inhibitory control positively contributed to misconception in psychology, or it can be said that high scores on inhibitory control (or low inhibitory control skills) are associated with the students' high scores in misconception in psychology, and vice versa.…”

Electrophysiological correlates of the continued influence effect of misinformation: an exploratory study

“…As alluded to in the preceding section, this finding suggests that misinformation may be rendered less familiar by a retraction, potentially as a result of the misinformation being suppressed by the integration of the retraction into the event model in memory. This could involve a process of active removal that unbinds a part representation from the mental model (Ecker, Lewandowsky, & Oberauer, 2014) or an inhibitory mechanism triggered by the co-activation of conflicting representations (Butterfuss & Kendeou, 2019). In other words, to the extent that the corrected misinformation is no longer part of the cue-activated mental event representation, the observed pattern would be expected.…”

The psychological drivers of misinformation belief and its resistance to correction

“…One instantiation of this selective-retrieval view appeals to a dual-process mechanism, which assumes that retrieval can occur based on an automatic, effortless process signalling information familiarity ('I think I have heard this before') or a more strategic, effortful process of recollection that includes contextual detail ('I read about this in yesterday's newspaper') 108 . According to this account of continued influence, the CIE can arise if there is automatic, familiarity-driven retrieval of the misinformation (for example, in response to a cue), without explicit recollection of the corrective information and associated post-retrieval suppression of the misinformation 107,109 .…”