Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Previous research has found that when information stored in memory is discredited, it can still influence later inferences one makes. This has previously been considered as an editing problem, where one has inferences based on the information prestored in memory before the discrediting, and one cannot successfully trace out and alter those inferences. However, in the course of comprehending an account, one can potentially make inferences after a discrediting, which may also show influence from the discredited information. In this experiment, subjects read a series of reports about a fire investigation, and their opportunity to make inferences before a correction appeared in the series was manipulated. Subjects received a correction statement either directly following the information it was to discredit, or with several statements intervening. The results show that subjects w h o received the correction directly after the information it corrected made as many inferences based on the discredited information as subjects w ho received the correction later (and thus could presumably make many more inferences before the correction occurred). This suggests that discredited information can influence inferences made after a correction, as well as those made before. Several hypotheses accounting for this effect are proposed.