Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Agents in a dynamic world must continue to comprehend and reason about events, even after they learn that previously encoded information about an event is incorrect. As a result, some mechanism is needed to modify incorrect information in memory, and allow one to use new, superceding knowledge instead. Ho w is misinformation suppressed in human memory? A study using a text understanding paradigm and a standard anaphoric inference task investigates this problem of updating memory. Subjects read a set of stories, half of which contained a conection, and were asked to make a speeded wordrecognition judgment for a probe word appearing after an anaphor sentence. Subjects in a short delay condition showed slower reaction times to correct referents in correction stories than in control stories that did not contain misinformation. Those in the longer delay condition showed no difference in reaction times to correct referents, but more priming for invalidated items in correction stories. These results suggest that misinformation can interfere with accessing correct information, but that an additional comprehension process, possibly suppression-like, may facilitate access to correct information after delay.