On Known Unknowns: Fluency and the Neural Mechanisms of Illusory Truth by Wei-Chun Wang, et al. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Posted Online January 14, 2016. (doi:10.1162/jocn_a_00923)
Abstract:
The “illusory truth” effect refers to the phenomenon whereby repetition of a statement increases its likelihood of being judged true. This phenomenon has important implications for how we come to believe oft-repeated information that may be misleading or unknown. Behavioral evidence indicates that fluency or the subjective ease experienced while processing a statement underlies this effect. This suggests that illusory truth should be mediated by brain regions previously linked to fluency, such as the perirhinal cortex (PRC). To investigate this possibility, we scanned participants with fMRI while they rated the truth of unknown statements, half of which were presented earlier (i.e., repeated). The only brain region that showed an interaction between repetition and ratings of perceived truth was PRC, where activity increased with truth ratings for repeated, but not for new, statements. This finding supports the hypothesis that illusory truth is mediated by a fluency mechanism and further strengthens the link between PRC and fluency.
Whether you are crowd sourcing authoring of a topic map, measuring sentiment or having content authored by known authors, you are unlikely to want it populated by illusory truths. That is truths your sources would swear to but that are in fact false (from a certain point of view).
I would like to say more about what this article reports but it is an “illusory publication” that resides behind a pay-wall so I don’t know what is says in fact.
Isn’t that ironic? An article on illusory truth that cannot substantiate its own claims. It can only repeat them.
I first saw this in a tweet by Stefano Bertolo