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People navigate a world shaped by a constant flood of information that does not always draw clear boundaries between what is true and what is false. To navigate such blended information environments, people must remember not only the content of information they encounter but also whether it was true or false and memorize its veracity. This dissertation focuses precisely on such a blended information environment in the context of event descriptions, where both true and false information co-occur. Specifically, it addresses the research question of when people succeed or fail to retrieve information accurately within this context, where some information receives additional veracity information. Attention is given especially to the role of narrative consistency, perceptual veracity cues, modality congruency, and confidence.
Across four empirical chapters, I examined four central questions. (1) How do inconsistencies between narratives shape reasoning about the described events? (2) Can confidence serve as a metacognitive signal that helps in navigating inconsistent content? (3) How do perceptual veracity cues influence the accuracy and confidence of veracity retrieval? And (4) How does modality (in)congruency influence the accuracy and confidence of veracity retrieval?
After introducing the general theoretical framework in Chapter 1, the first empirical chapter (Chapter 2) addresses how competing but unlabeled causes affect event reasoning. My results showed that both proactive and retroactive interference can occur, suggesting that the persistence of information depends less on the presentation order than on the coexistence of competing causes in memory. Providing a veracity cue as to which cause is accurate, however, can shift the reasoning in the right direction.
Chapter 3 extends these findings by incorporating confidence judgments, showing that confidence does not necessarily track accuracy but moderates which cause is later used in reasoning. High confidence was often related to whichever cause was more fluently retrieved, irrespective of its accuracy. Providing a cue to the accurate cause also shifted confidence towards that cause. Thus, confidence was shown not to track accuracy reliably but to act as a metacognitive signal that determined which information was maintained or successfully updated.
Chapter 4 investigates perceptual veracity cues embedded in coherent event descriptions. While the presence of such cues reduced overall accuracy, they also revealed asymmetries. False-labeled details were more likely to be forgotten or misremembered as true, and these errors were often related to high confidence. Thus, cues designed to highlight veracity may foster false confidence if the cue is forgotten.
Chapter 5 addresses modality inconsistency between encoding and retrieval. Across three experiments, cross-modal retrieval was found to impair veracity retrieval, especially when false-labeled information was encoded in text and later retrieved in graphics. By contrast, information encoded in graphics was more robust to modality shifts, highlighting asymmetries in how encoding formats determine the retrieval of veracity information.
Taken together, the chapters in this dissertation show that veracity retrieval is a dynamic process shaped by fluency, cues, modality, and confidence. False-labeled information is particularly fragile, being more likely to be forgotten, misremembered, or confidently misclassified as true. These results extend models of situation model construction, source monitoring, and truth tagging by emphasizing the dynamic role of confidence as a metacognitive factor in veracity retrieval. From an applied perspective, they caution against simplistic interventions such as labeling false information, which can unintentionally increase misplaced confidence. It underlines the need for approaches that promote accurate confidence calibration and resilience across modalities in order to better protect people against misinformation. |
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