Disinformation is fallacious information created intentionally to mislead the receiver and to cause public harm. Different types of media, such as the internet, blogs and social media provide a perfect environment for spreading disinformation due to lack of control for the reliability of sources. This project studies disinformation by integrating educational, cognitive psychological, psychophysiological, and neuroscientific methods. Our goal is to map the overall picture of secondary school students' abilities to detect disinformation in various digital media, to understand the related cognitive, affective, and neural mechanisms, and to develop and test effective pedagogical means for teaching disinformation detection to protect young people against the disadvantages of disinformation. Our integrated approach also produces an integrative theoretical model for disinformation processing and widely applicable pedagogical materials and methods for teaching disinformation detection skills.

2024

2028