Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Social media platforms provide a source for transmittinginformation that can become widely accepted. However, inthis process of transmission, information becomes susceptibleto distortion. In this study, we assessed people’s semantic(i.e., prior expectations) and recognition memory for popculture content, as a function of confidence and perceivedinformation source. In Experiment 1, we investigatedsemantic memory for ubiquitous movie quotes (e.g., thefamous Star Wars quote “Luke I am your father”). Notablythis quote is incorrect, but we found that a majority ofparticipants accepted these lure quotes as true with highconfidence and indicated they had experienced the originalsource. In Experiment 2, participants viewed the originalmovie sources before a recognition test of the quotes. Wefound that while there was some improvement, people stillpreferred the lure quote with high confidence. We discuss thefindings in terms of the strength of people’s prior expectationswhen reconstructing events from memory.