Perceiving is Believing?

The rise of social media has led to a proliferation in the amount of false information we are each exposed to on a daily basis. This has been blamed for a range of problems including: failure to act to mitigate climate change, political violence and democracy interference. In this talk, I'll outline my PhD research investigating how individuals learn from false information and show how this learning impacts our decisions and can lead to biased choices. I'll highlight what my research tells us about how to reduce the impact of false information in cases where it can lead to societal harm.

The world around us is complex, and we don't have the capacity to take it all in. That’s why our perception sometimes takes short-cuts, and uses our goals and experiences to decide what to focus on or to fill in the gaps for us. In this talk, we'll explore how our brains shape what we see, with a special emphasis on how the rhythms our brains produce help us notice (or ignore) different things.