tophome

E-poster

Session: 4

PS4-09 | Synaptic homeostasis and fake news

Candela Sofia Leon

Laboratorio de Sueño y Memoria/Instituto Tecnológico de Buenos Aires

The spread of “fake news” has become a major problem for societies around the world since the popularization of the internet and social media, which increased the ability to create and share information. Recent work showed that when people see invented news, can believe and even generate a memory of these false events, that is, fake news are capable of generating a false memory, and this occurs especially when the content of the fake material is consistent with ideology. On the other hand, it has been observed that there are individual factors such as analytical thinking ability, reasoning style or cognitive abilities that influence the generation of these false memories. Besides, a recent study found that decision-making is a result of the combination of the person’s chronotype and the sleep pressure they have at the time of the evaluation. In this work we hypothesize that people’s sleep pressure when observing fake news is a predictor of the ability to generate false memories about fake news. To study this, we developed a set of fake news that was presented mixed with real news. Our results indicate that people with higher sleep pressure tended to remember more fake news as they had really happened, than people with low pressure. We discuss these results in terms of the theory of synaptic homeostasis.