True or false? Cognitive load when reading COVID-19 news headlines: an eye-tracking study

TL;DR

This eye-tracking study investigates how cognitive load varies when reading COVID-19 news headlines, revealing that true and false claims impose different mental efforts depending on evidence correctness and prior beliefs.

Contribution

The study provides novel insights into how cognitive load differs for true versus false COVID-19 news headlines in a fact-checking context using eye-tracking data.

Findings

Higher cognitive load for true claims with incorrect evidence

Higher cognitive load for false claims with correct evidence

Belief change did not significantly affect cognitive load

Abstract

Misinformation is an important topic in the Information Retrieval (IR) context and has implications for both system-centered and user-centered IR. While it has been established that the performance in discerning misinformation is affected by a person's cognitive load, the variation in cognitive load in judging the veracity of news is less understood. To understand the variation in cognitive load imposed by reading news headlines related to COVID-19 claims, within the context of a fact-checking system, we conducted a within-subject, lab-based, quasi-experiment (N=40) with eye-tracking. Our results suggest that examining true claims imposed a higher cognitive load on participants when news headlines provided incorrect evidence for a claim and were inconsistent with the person's prior beliefs. In contrast, checking false claims imposed a higher cognitive load when the news headlines provided correct evidence for a claim and were consistent with the participants' prior beliefs. However, changing beliefs after examining a claim did not have a significant relationship with cognitive load while reading the news headlines. The results illustrate that reading news headlines related to true and false claims in the fact-checking context impose different levels of cognitive load. Our findings suggest that user engagement with tools for discerning misinformation needs to account for the possible variation in the mental effort involved in different information contexts.