SYNAPTIC HOMEOSTASIS AND FAKE NEWS

LEÓN, CANDELA S; BONILLA, MATÍAS; CECILIA FORCATO; URRETA BENITEZ, FACUNDO

Congreso; Congreso Anual SAN2021; 2021

Sociedad Argentina de Investigación en Neurociencias

The spread of fake news has become a major problem for societies. Recent studies showed that when people are confronted with invented news, can believe and even generate a false memory of these events1, and this is increased when the content of the fake material is consistent with their ideology2. Further, it has been observed that there are individual factors such as cognitive or analytical thinking abilities that influence the generation of false memories3. 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 evaluation4. Here, we hypothesize that people´s sleep pressure when observing fake news is a predictor of the capacity to generate false memories about fake news. To study this, we developed a set of fake news that was presented mixed with real news. We discuss the results in the framework of the Synaptic Homeostasis Hypothesis.