Content, Consumer, Corrections: A Neurocognitive Model of Misinformation Processing

Abstract

The rapid proliferation of misinformation in digital environments poses a serious threat to public health, political institutions, and public discourse. Behavioral research has accumulated substantial evidence on why people believe and share false information, yet individual studies address cognitive biases, social factors, or emotional processes largely in isolation. Additionally, the influential integrative frameworks that do exist operate exclusively at the behavioral level, overlooking the neurophysiological mechanisms of misinformation processing. This work addresses that gap by proposing a neurocognitive model that synthesizes behavioral and neuroimaging findings within a unified framework. Following an integrative review methodology, we organize the literature around three domains: message characteristics (Content: emotionality, novelty, repetition), individual consumer traits (Consumer: analytical thinking, need for cognition, working memory, conformity, emotional state, and prior beliefs), and corrective interventions (Corrections: reactive debunking and pre-emptive prebunking, inoculation, and warnings). For each domain, principal behavioral factors are mapped onto their fMRI and EEG/MEG/ERP correlates. Crossdomain analysis reveals that these behaviorally distinct phenomena rely on a shared neural infrastructure of four functional hubs, each performing a core computational operation: conflict detection (anterior cingulate cortex), belief valuation (ventromedial prefrontal cortex), memory encoding and persistence (hippocampal–amygdala circuit), and executive control (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and inferior frontal gyrus). Framed as a mechanism sketch, the model generates testable neuroimaging predictions and points toward neuroscience-informed strategies for countering misinformation.