Examining the role of information integration in the continued influence effect using an event segmentation approach

Misinformation regarding the cause of an event often continues to influence an individual’s event-related reasoning, even after they have received a retraction. This is known as the continued influence effect (CIE). Dominant theoretical models of the CIE have suggested the effect arises primarily from failures to retrieve the correction. However, recent research has implicated information integration and memory updating processes in the CIE. As a behavioural test of integration, we applied an event segmentation approach to the CIE paradigm. Event segmentation theory suggests that incoming information is parsed into distinct events separated by event boundaries, which can have implications for memory. As such, when an individual encodes an event report that contains a retraction, the presence of event boundaries should impair retraction integration and memory updating, resulting in an enhanced CIE. Experiments 1 and 2 employed spatial event segmentation boundaries in an attempt to manipulate the ease with which a retraction can be integrated into a participant’s mental event model. While Experiment 1 showed no impact of an event boundary, Experiment 2 yielded evidence that an event boundary resulted in a reduced CIE. To the extent that this finding reflects enhanced retrieval of the retraction relative to the misinformation, it is more in line with retrieval accounts of the CIE.