An ongoing secondary task can reduce the illusory truth effect

Abstract

Introduction: People are more likely to believe repeated information—this is known as the Illusory Truth Effect (ITE). Recent research on the ITE has shown that semantic processing of statements plays a key role. In our day to day experience, we are often multi-tasking which can impact our ongoing processing of information around us. In three experiments, we investigate how asking participants to engage in an ongoing secondary task in the ITE paradigm influences the magnitude of the effect of repetition on belief. Methods: Using an adapted ITE paradigm, we embedded a secondary task into each trial of the encoding and/or test phase (e.g., having participants count the number of vowels in a target word of each trivia claim) and calculated the overall accuracy on the task. Results: We found that the overall ITE was larger when participants had no ongoing secondary task during the experiment. Further, we predicted and found that higher accuracy on the secondary task was associated with a larger ITE. Discussion: These findings provide initial evidence that engaging in an ongoing secondary task may reduce the impact of repetition. Our findings suggest that exploring the impact of secondary tasks on the ITE is a fruitful area for further research.