Schedule of Events | Symposia

Vividness of mental imagery and its relationship with resilience to misinformation in young adults

Poster Session C - Sunday, March 30, 2025, 5:00 – 7:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Kennedy King¹ (contactkennedyk@gmail.com), Himanshu Chaudhary², Ayanna Thomas³, Elizabeth Race⁴; ¹Tufts University

Exposure to misleading information after a witnessed event leads to memory distortion for that event (misinformation effect). Prior research has demonstrated that the misinformation effect involves faulty reconstructive processes during memory retrieval whereby misleading information is remembered as part of an original event. Vividness of retrieved information is one factor that has been shown to be important for the accuracy of memory (Foville, 2020; Cooper et al., 2019). The current study investigated whether individual differences in visual mental imagery ability can prevent one from making memory errors in the face of misinformation. One hundred participants viewed a silent crime video (the original event) and then listened to an audio narrative describing the crime. Importantly, some details in the audio narrative were modified to be misleading. After the audio narrative, participants took a forced-choice memory test about the details of the original event and filled out the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ) as a measure of trait visual imagery ability. Participants demonstrated a robust misinformation effect in which they incorporated misleading details into their memory, but the magnitude of this effect did not correlate with their VVIQ score. However, there was a significant correlation between VVIQ and general memory accuracy in young adults. These findings suggest that while trait visual imagery ability can positively benefit memory performance in the absence of conflicting information in memory, it does not reduce memory errors in the face of misinformation.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic