Representation and Strategic Validation of Conflicting Information in Multi-Source, Multi-Modal, and Multi-Language Literacy Contexts

• Applicant: Professor Mohammad Nabi Karimi, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Developmental and Educational Psychology ; Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 541374318

When dealing with controversial information sources, readers tend to build slanted belief-colored representations of the information presented (an effect referred to as the text-belief consistency effect; Maier & Richter, 2013, Cognition and Instruction). This effect has been mostly studied in relation to textual information documented in a first language (mostly German or English). However, in the current digital era, texts are not the only media for dissemination of information. Visualizations of various types including static or moving pictures (e.g., videos) are also rapidly gaining recognition as media for information dissemination, which are also usually presented in multiple languages including information users’ first or additional languages. The present project is meant to extend theoretical and empirical bases for the text-belief consistency effect to multi-source multi-language multi-modal information contexts (i.e., information that is documented in different languages and is presented across different modalities). Motivated by the lack of evidence as to how individuals are likely integrate information from across multiple videos about socio-scientific topics, as its first aim, the project will investigate how information users represent video-based conflicting information that coheres more or less with their pre-existing beliefs. The proposed project further aims to investigate how information users strategically validate conflicting video-based information. More specifically, the project aims to investigate the validation strategies (e.g., epistemic elaboration, consistency checking, etc.) that information users employ when trying to comprehend and integrate information presented across multiple conflicting videos and how their pre-existing beliefs interact with their strategic processing attempts. As another aim, the project will comparatively investigate the cross-modal representations as well as the strategic validation of conflicting information. Furthermore, in light of the preliminary evidence for language as a source feature, the proposed project aims to extend the role of language as a credibility cue to cross-modal contexts in light of the assumption that the visibility of language as a credibility cue is likely to be greater in spoken modality than in written modality as the latter is often assumed to be only a secondary representation of the former.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigator: Professor Dr. Tobias Richter