Your eyes reveal how strongly you believe fake news before you even make a choice

https://www.psypost.org/your-eyes-r...ieve-fake-news-before-you-even-make-a-choice/

A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that our preexisting beliefs deeply influence how we learn new information in our daily lives. By tracking eye movements and decision-making during a simulated news evaluation game, scientists found that people readily learn from rewards that match their existing views but struggle to adapt when rewards challenge their preconceived notions.

These findings provide evidence for the cognitive pathways that allow misinformation to persist in the modern digital landscape. This dynamic explains why simply presenting factual corrections often fails to change minds.

Oh, isn’t that last sentence so true I’ve spent over a decade bringing certain facts and experiences to the table tying to help change or at least influence people’s beliefs in areas I’m highly knowledgeable about but all I have ever done, is most cases, is strengthen their resolve in their own per-conceived perspectives. So to all that decry facts over feelings, it is usually the other way around.

"People increasingly rely on social media platforms for their daily news consumption, where automated algorithms tend to filter content to match users’ existing preferences. This digital environment provides a fertile ground for disinformation to spread rapidly across large populations, raising the question of why individuals continue to believe false content even when objective fact-checking is readily available."

From the pay walled scholarly article: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2518776123

Significance
In an age where misinformation spreads rapidly and online environments favor belief-consistent information, understanding how people learn from and act upon misleading content is a scientific and societal priority. This study integrates fake news evaluation, reward-based learning, and pupillometry to uncover how veracity judgments and confidence shape choice behavior. We show that participants readily follow reinforcement when it aligns with their prior beliefs, but struggle to adapt when rewards favor confidence. Crucially, pupil dilation reveals that these effects emerge even before decisions are made, reflecting early engagement of confidence-related mechanisms. These findings suggest that rigidity in belief-related choices may arise from predecisional reinforcement dynamics that stabilize existing epistemic structures, highlighting cognitive pathways through which misinformation can persist.

Abstract
Information selection plays a crucial role in how individuals navigate online content. While confirmation bias has been implicated in this phenomenon, its interaction with reinforcement learning dynamics and internal confidence signals remains poorly understood. Here, we examined how veracity judgments and confidence shape choices when probabilistic rewards are tied to different epistemic attributes of news headlines. Participants completed a three-phase paradigm that combined news classification, a probabilistic learning task with varying reward contingencies, and a final reevaluation phase. Using real and false headlines judged for veracity and confidence, we created personalized sets of stimulus categories that were later used in a two-armed bandit task. In different blocks of trials, reinforcement was probabilistically associated with either the perceived truthfulness or confidence of each item. Across all experimental phases, pupil dilation provided neurophysiological signatures of belief-related processing. At a behavioral level, participants showed higher accuracies and learning rates when rewards were contingent on their previous judgments of veracity, whereas performance was markedly reduced when reinforcement favored confidence, especially low-confidence options. Pupillometric data revealed predecisional modulations tied to subjective confidence, while computational modeling showed that participants relied on feature-based generalization when veracity predicted reward and shifted toward valence-sensitive updating when contingencies no longer matched their prior epistemic structure. Together, these results reveal how veracity and confidence jointly guide reinforcement-driven choices and modulate the flexibility of belief-related decisions. By integrating cognitive, computational, and physiological data, our study provides a mechanistic understanding of how prior beliefs shape learning in complex and misinformation-rich contexts.

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