The role of familiarity in correcting inaccurate information.

People frequently continue to use inaccurate information in their reasoning even after a credible retraction has been presented.This phenomenon is often referred to as the continued influence effect of misinformation.The repetition of the original misconception within a retraction could contribute to this phenomenon, as it could inadvertently make the "myth" more familiar-and familiar information is more likely to be accepted as true.From a dual-process perspective, familiarity-based acceptance of myths is most likely to occur in the absence of strategic memory processes.We thus examined factors known to affect whether strategic memory processes can be utilized; age, detail, and time.Participants rated their belief in various statements of unclear veracity, and facts were subsequently affirmed and myths were retracted.Participants then rerated their belief either immediately or after a delay.We compared groups of young and older participants, and we manipulated the amount of detail presented in the affirmative/corrective explanations, as well as the retention interval between encoding and a retrieval attempt.We found that (1) older adults over the age of 65 were worse at sustaining their post-correction belief that myths were inaccurate, (2) a greater level of explanatory detail promoted more sustained belief change, and (3) fact affirmations promoted more sustained belief change in comparison to myth retractions over the course of one week (but not over three weeks).This supports the notion that familiarity is indeed a driver of continued influence effects.