Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

People often judge claims using cues like familiarity and source credibility, but later judgments may also be shaped by memory for what they previously believed. We used a three-phase task to separate these influences. Prolific participants (N = 130) completed 30 pairs of factual statements across five domains. In Section 1, they rated belief in an initial statement (S1) and their familiarity with it. In Section 2, they rated belief in a conceptually related evidence statement (S2) paired with a source and judged source credibility and statement familiarity; S2 either supported or refuted S1. In Section 3, they reported what they thought they answered for S1 earlier (belief-memory) and then re-rated S1. Mixed-effects models showed that credibility and S2 familiarity predicted Section-2 belief, while belief-memory and final belief about S1 were associated with both initial belief and the implications of S2 evaluation.