Learning errors from fiction: Difficulties in reducing reliance on fictional stories

Reducing reliance on inaccurate information.

People learn from the texts that they read, but sometimes what they read is wrong. Previous research has demonstrated that individuals encode even obvious inaccuracies, at times relying on the misinformation to complete postreading tasks. In the present study, we investigated whether the influence of inaccurate information might be reduced by encouraging the retrieval of accurate knowledge. Par...

Bollywood motifs: Cricket fiction and fictional cricket

Children's Causal Learning from Fiction: Assessing the Proximity Between Real and Fictional Worlds

Fictional information presents a unique challenge to the developing child. Children must learn when it is appropriate to transfer information from the fictional space to the real world and what contextual cues should be considered in this decision. The current research explores children’s causal inferences between fictional representations and reality by examining their developing sensitivity t...

Learning to learn from stories: children's developing sensitivity to the causal structure of fictional worlds.

Fiction presents a unique challenge to the developing child, in that children must learn when to generalize information from stories to the real world. This study examines how children acquire causal knowledge from storybooks, and whether children are sensitive to how closely the fictional world resembles reality. Preschoolers (N = 108) listened to stories in which a novel causal relation was e...

Learning facts from fiction

People s knowledge about the world comes from many sources, including fictional ones such as movies and novels. In three experiments, we investigated how people learn and integrate information from fictional sources with their general world knowledge. Subjects read a series of short stories that contained information about the real world. After a short delay, all participants took a general kno...