Whom to Believe? Understanding and Modeling Brain Activity in Source Credibility Evaluation

Abstract

Understanding how humans evaluate credibility is an important scientific question in the era of fake news. Source credibility is among the most important aspects of credibility evaluations. One of the most direct ways to understand source credibility is to use measurements of brain activity of humans performing credibility evaluations. Nevertheless, source credibility has never been investigated using such a method before. This article reports the results of an experiment during which we have measured brain activity during source credibility evaluation, using EEG. The experiment allowed for identification of brain areas that were active when a participant made positive or negative source credibility evaluations. Based on experimental data, we modeled and predicted human source credibility evaluations using EEG brain activity measurements with F1 score exceeding 0.7 (using 10-fold cross-validation).

Modeling and Comparing Brain Processes in Message and Earned Source Credibility Evaluation

“…The models are interpretable and reveal huge differences between brain processes involved in the two kinds of credibility evaluation. Moreover, our source credibility model strongly confirms and validates results obtained in previous research (Kawiak et al, 2020b), confirming that we are indeed increasing our understanding of how the human brain evaluates source credibility.…”

“…The distinction between reputed and earned source credibility is useful to understand the scope of this article. Previous work (Kawiak et al, 2020b) investigated brain process involved in reputed source credibility evaluation. In an experiment participants were informed about sources' frequency of correctly answering a question.…”

“…In neuroinformatics and neuroscience, most research related to credibility has focused on lie detection (Wang et al, 2016;Meijer and Verschuere, 2017), which is based on the investigation of the brain activity of the author, and not the receiver of the message. Previous research has attempted to study source credibility evaluation separately using EEG (Kawiak et al, 2020b). In this work, we set a different goal.…”

Investigating brain cortical activity in patients with post-COVID-19 brain fog

“…Our dense array amplifier recorded the ERP signal from all 256 electrodes. However, we expected to find differences on the so-called cognitive electrodes based on our previous experience in the cognitive processing EEG signal analysis (Kawiak et al, 2020 ; Kwasniewicz et al, 2021 ; Schneider et al, 2022 ). These electrodes are described in the EGI 256-channel cap specification as best for cognitive ERP observations, covering the scalp regularly, and numbered as follows: E98, E99, E100, E101, E108, E109, E110, E116, E117, E118, E119, E124, E125, E126, E127, E128, E129, E137, E138, E139, E140, E141, E149, E150, E151, and E152 (see Figure 1 ).…”

Why is fake news so fascinating to the brain?

“…A further element under consideration is the evaluation of source credibility. When asked to evaluate the credibility of a source of information during EEG, significant activations in the inferior parietal lobule, the insula, and the ACC of participating individuals have been reported (Kawiak et al, 2020). This suggests that the process of credibility evaluation requires two mechanisms similar to those involved in complementary processes: (1) decision‐making under emotionally charged situations, as in moral dilemmas (Harlé et al, 2012; Stern et al, 2010), and (2) the assessment of probability for rewards under high uncertainty (Stern et al, 2010).…”