Cognitive Science
NTCenter’s family of disinformation-related projects adds a new member!
We are excited today by news coming from Belgium where we applied earlier this year for another expansion of our flagship disinformation and misinformation applied research and development work. We are now a long way from where we started back in 2018 with De Facto. And here we are today, celebrating a successful application that…
Read MoreInTACT project getting closer to a milestone
Last year we launched InTACT, a project inspired by De Facto. InTACT’s concept includes a full training model, starting with a self-assessment test to determine individual susceptibility to conspiracy theory beliefs, a novel deconstruction approach where conspiracy theories will be “disassembled”, just as engineers and hardware technicians disassemble a piece of equipment to show students…
Read MoreALiCE in the Wonderland of Citizenship Education
After months of desktop research and data collection, ALiCE is getting closer to a key event – a training workshop in Kromeriz, CZ, for teachers in Citizenship Education (CE) and those who teach other subjects focusing on competences related to CE. As the focus on the project is to design and develop methods for adequate…
Read MoredBias enters a critical stage
Our dBias project that attempts to validate a model where, by means of realistic situations constructed around teacher-learner interaction and filmed on video, we will be able to identify the presence and relative strength of a range of biases. Starting with close to 200, we narrowed down the list of cognitive biases for our experiment…
Read MoreConspiracy Theories: A Deconstruction Model
NTCenter maintains a continuous focus on disinformation and disinformation related-cognition. With the financial support of the Erasmus+ programme of the EU, we are launching InTACT, a 30-months project on conspiracy theories. Our working hypothesis is that we can apply a methodology similar to the one we had recently adopted in De Facto for building resilience…
Read MoreA Touch of Conspiracy: ‘Denver Airport’ & ‘Finland does not exist’
It seems to me that the general knowledge of conspiracy theories (e.g. to be able to mention at least 3 of them) lately has drastically widened. Whether it’s triggered by the sudden abundance of time to spend on free browsing as millions remained home due to lockdown; or by the evident incapacity of ruling authorities…
Read MoreCognitive scripts in social interaction
In his 2012 book Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior, Leonard Mlodinow recounts an experiment based on the memory theories of Frederik Bartlett (among which we find particularly interesting the Theory of Remembering). The experiment is carried in a public library, in the copying machine sector. Every time a visitor would head to the…
Read MoreDe Facto Project Approved for Funding by the European Commission
NTCenter is pleased to announce that a project based on our disinformation and misionformation counteracting methodology has been approved for funding by the EU. We partner with universities and training organisations from Belgium, United Kingdom, Czechia, Slovenia, Italy and Poland. The De Facto project will focus in the next 3 years on research and development…
Read MoreClassification of misinformation and disinformation
When we at NTCenter first started our focused investigation on disinformation and misinformation, the topic consisted mostly of fractured content centered around media and politics. And the debate would rarely go beyound that field. However, one particular thread caught our attention, even though it was also focused on journalism and politics to draw examples from,…
Read MoreEquivalency and Emphasis Frames
Chong and Druckman, in the context of media and communications, claim that framing takes two principal formats – equivalency and emphasis frames. Equivalency frames refer to statements which are logically equivalent, but phrased differently. Thus, the phrasing causes individuals to alter their preferences. With emphasis frames, people make different judgements depending on which aspect of a…
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