How slopaganda exploits features of human cognition

Human cognition relies on mechanisms that shape how we attend to, process, and store information form the environment. Repetition, information overload, biases, individual prior knowledge and beliefs can all influence what we believe to be true when confronted with new information. Research on false memory formation can explain how people start believing inaccurate information, highlighting how core cognitive processes shape encoding, consolidation and retrieval. In this paper, we outline the cognitive dimension of a growing body of research on disinformation called slopaganda. Enabled by Generative Artificial Intelligence, slopaganda can create text, image, video, and other content cheaply, quickly, and can tailor such material to specific groups or individuals. We argue that the best way to understand the effects of disinformation is through theories developed in fundamental memory research, particularly those explaining how false memories form and how individuals remember inaccurate information. Here, we highlight how disinformation may interact with low-level cognitive mechanisms that shape perception, attention, memory and reasoning. We argue that the focus should be on individual-level differences in cognitive processes when trying to understand the effects of disinformation. Mitigating the effects of disinformation on society, we suggest, requires empirical work that builds on what is already known about false memory formation.