INFORMATION PROCESSING – HEURISTIC VS SYSTEMATIC AND SUSCEPTIBILITY OF SHARING COVID 19-RELATED FAKE NEWS ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Social media has turned into a fertile ground for COVID-19 fake news. The present study aims to provide a hypothetical and empirical background to elucidate the psychological and behavioral aspects of information processing and susceptibility of sharing the fake news, with especial reference to COVID-19 news on social media. The study explores the relation between the select variables and heuristic and systematic information processing. Grounded on prior studies, this paper presents a research model to address susceptibility of sharing the fake news on social media, and identifies characteristics that may be more susceptible than others for sharing fake news on social media including Sharing Motivation (SM), Social Media Fatigue (SMF), Feel Good Factor (FGF), Fear of Missing out (FoMO), News Characteristics (NC) and five Big Personality Traits. The data collected from 244 respondents was analyzed with the help of IBM SPSS 23, using descriptive and statistical test, including means, standard deviations, and correlation analysis conducted. Correlation exploration was utilized to study the association between the select variables and systematic and heuristic information processing and susceptibility of sharing the fake news on social media. The findings show several factors contribute to information processing in both modes. The study confirms that heuristic processing is significantly associated with susceptibility of sharing fake news. The research adds to the media studies, behavioral and psychological disciplines, as it examines the relationships between the select variables and the systematic and heuristic information processing and COVID-19 fake news on social media. The present investigation makes an innovative and original contribution to media studies by exploring the relationship between select variables and susceptibility for sharing fake news on social media. The study presents a research model to identify the influence of select variables on information processing and the susceptibility to falling prey to fake news on social media and contributes to the domain to media studies.

Syntactic ambiguity resolution and revision processes in complement sentences

Temporarily ambiguous sentences are sometimes misanalysed and require revision during sentence processing. Previous studies have reported that non-syntactic information such as verb subcategorisation information does not always prevent misanalysis. However, there is contradictory evidence about whether non-syntactic information is immediately used to recover the globally correct analysis. Previous studies have also reported that initially assigned misinterpretations linger after disambiguation. Some recent studies have suggested that this lingering misinterpretation does not result from a failure to conduct syntactic revision. However, the current evidence for syntactic revision is scarce, limited to a syntactic structure and eye-movement while reading task, and crucially does not necessarily prove that syntactic revision is successfully conducted. The present study reports three self-paced reading experiments that investigate these issues, using temporarily ambiguous complement sentences. Experiment 1 showed that temporarily ambiguous complement sentences are misanalysed during sentence processing, which subsequently causes garden-path effects and lingering misinterpretation. Experiment 2 suggested that non-syntactic information is immediately used to recover the globally correct analysis. However, there was an indication that the incorrect analysis remains activated. Experiment 3 revealed that syntactic revision is conducted in complement sentences without regressive eye movements. The present study argues that the good-enough account can explain these results if this account assumes that a syntactic processing heuristic such as the Canonical Sentoid Strategy is used during the processing of temporarily ambiguous complement sentences.

How Perceived Processing Fluency Influences the Illusion of Knowing in Learning From TV Reports

The present two-study work aims to contribute to an understanding of the causes and consequences of perceived processing fluency. Regarding its causes, the experimental studies ( N1 = 399; N2 = 337) found that features of television reports (e.g., footage used, background music) can heighten perceptions of processing fluency. Regarding its consequences, it was found that heightened perceived fluency biases metacognitive judgments. Specifically, considering perceived knowledge in relation to actual knowledge, recipients experiencing fluency have been found to overestimate their knowledge about the issue depicted in the experimental stimuli. The resulting illusion of knowing was particularly pronounced under conditions of low involvement, indicating that the so-called ease-of-processing heuristic underlies the effect.

´SOMETHING SIMILAR I’VE ALREADY LEARNED, THUS I EASILY WILL REMEMBER IT!´: THE EASE-OF-PROCESSING HEURISTIC AS A SOURCE IN METAMEMORY JUDGMENTS UNDER PROACTIVE INTERFERENCE CONDITION

In line with some metamemory literature, people are unable to predict the influence of interference on their metacognitive ability to prognosticate future memory performance (Eakin, 2005). However, according to other researchers, there are certain circumstances in which an individual can predict the factors that restrict access to the target information in memory (Maki, 1999; Diaz & Benjamin, 2011). Henceforth, this study is aimed at investigating the ease of processing heuristics as a source of errors on the meta-level in terms of proactive interference (PI), as well as the conditions under which it is possible to avoid its negative impact on the accuracy of different types of metamemory judgments. To do this, we encouraged participants to make metamemory judgments (e.g., EOL, JOL) under the time pressure and without it (non-analytic and analytic groups) in two different conditions (interference and control). Our findings demonstrate that (i) fast metamemory judgments are based on ease-of-processing heuristics, which enhances the “illusion of knowing” (see Eakin, 2005); (ii) inferences during study allocation can diminish the effect of the “illusion of knowing” phenomenon. In addition, analytic inference leads to more accurate metamemory performance under PI condition. In addition, analytical metamemory judgments are more accurate under PI condition; also it should be concluded that, despite the fact that the primary source of information in making EOL judgments is ease-of-processing heuristics, in this process some other resources, analogical to JOL judgments, were involved. Key words: metamemory judgments, proactive interference (PI), ease-of-processing heuristic.