Research project

Using Learning Principles to Protect People from Fake News

Research groups:

Centre for Perception and Cognition (CPC)
Lead researchers:

Professor Philip Higham
Status:

Active

Project overview

Fake news on the internet is negatively impacting both individuals and society like never before. Social media companies are involved in a game similar to whac-a mole, removing or identifying fake news soon after it appears, for it only to reappear elsewhere shortly afterwards because it has been shared. Our research aims to tackle the problem of fake news not by addressing it after-the-fact, but by training people to identify fake news when it first appears, thereby inoculating them against its influence. Relative to existing research, we achieve this aim using a novel methodology and a new “feature-utilisation” theoretical framework.

Staff

Lead researchers

Professor Philip Higham

Professor of Experimental Psychology

Research interests

Enhancing student learning in educational settings
Protecting social media users from fake news
Understanding the interplay of controlled and automatic influences of retrieval practice

Connect with Philip

Email: higham@soton.ac.uk

Collaborating research institutes, centres and groups

Centre for Perception and Cognition (CPC)

We investigate cognitive psychology and human perception processes through vision, touch and sound. Our research explores high-level functions, including learning, memory, metacognition and reading.