Russian scientists from the Higher School of Economics (HSE) found out that bilinguals (people equally posted in two languages) are predisposed to some types of false memories, for example, to an attribution error. In other words, a person who owns two languages may be wrong to remember whether he received information from an input source or source in Russian. The researchers presented their findings in the article published in the Frontiers in Psychology magazine.
Specialists considered the hypothetical situation in which the person who owns the two languages is forced to test indicators in someone else’s country. Compared with witnesses, for which someone else’s language is native, Bilingv can receive information from a larger number of sources. It is known that the memory of a person is imperfect and can change over time. Although it is believed that the person who owns the two languages is inclined to better understand what has happened, little is known about how bilingualism really affects the formation of erroneous memories.
In the online study, in which the so-called disinformation paradigm was used (a method for reproducing the conditions of real disinformation), 56 Russian-speaking participants who own English on an average or high level and not studied language in the English-speaking environment. They were demonstrated by video with a real robbery of the car with a duration of a minute, after which volunteers completed a series of distracting tasks in about four minutes.
After that, they were given a pair of texts written in Russian and English and presented as evidence of various eyewitnesses that are carriers of various languages. Each text contained five erroneous parts (for example, another color of clothes in people’s video). Then the participants passed the test where they should be determined whether any detail was present on video, and to indicate the degree of confidence in the answer on a scale from one (not at all) to ten (completely sure). They also suggested to remember whether the part was mentioned in one of two texts and in what language.
Scientists expected volunteers will be better or worse to recognize disinformation presented in a non-standard language, but it turned out that there was no difference. In addition, the participants were inclined with a high degree of confidence to believe that the plastic information that the English-speaking source actually was provided was to a Russian-speaking source. Such an attribution error was not observed in the case of Russian-speaking sources.
How the authors of the work are written, the results show that the high level of ownership of the second language does not affect the dedication recognition, but it makes the bilingual more prone to some types of memory errors when required, for example, to recall the correct source of information.