The School of Economics measured brain performance in detecting false information in people with different media literacy. This was reported by the press service of the National Research University Higher School of Economics.
Scientists were interested in psychophysiological misinformation about a person. The volunteers were two groups of HSE students. One of them took media literacy courses at university and had experience in critical analysis of media, while the second did not. “The idea was to look at the role these factors play in the perception of disinformation,” said Olga Kuskova, one of the study’s authors.
During the experiment, volunteers were shown videos longer than one minute – movies about fake news, conspiracy theories, and an episode of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV series. For control, participants were also shown an emotionally neutral video recording of a person walking in the park.
During the imaging session, the volunteers were hooked up to an electroencephalograph. The method of intersubjective correlation was used, which assumes that the brain activity of people associated with the perception of the video’s content, although often individual, will be synchronized. Moreover, the higher the emotional involvement, the higher the synchronization.
This method is important because it “allows you to capture the audience’s bursts of attention and then compare the engagement level of both groups,” the scientist said.
Analysis of electroencephalograms showed that the perception of the videos by the participants of both groups was very similar, the level of synchronization of brain activity in the groups practically did not differ. Although there were almost no psychophysiological differences in perception, participants with low media literacy scores and low need for cognition had higher engagement and motivation to watch. The same people tended to trust what they saw: After watching videos about conspiracy theories, participants changed their minds on the subject.
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