ERP Correlates of the Semantic Violations in the Deepfakes Containing Disinformation Regarding COVID-19: Pilot Study

The current study examined behavioral and electrophysiological responses to attitude-consistent and attitude-inconsistent auditory deepfakes on COVID-19 vaccination topic. Deepfakes portrayed Russian media- influencers (two speaker types: a prominent medical doctor and COVID-dissident), broadcasting statements opposite to their public opinion. We hypothesized that people would evaluate the trust-associated statements higher to deepfake aligning with their internal attitudes. We employed electroencephalography (EEG) to record participants' brain responses, expecting the N400-like amplitude to be more negative when hearing a manipulated audio recording (deepfake) mismatching their internal attitudes and the speaker's public opinion on the topic. Overall, 29 participants performed a pilot study: they listened to deepfakes, rated their level of agreement to trust-related statements for each recording and completed questionnaires on analytical thinking, need for cognition and tendency to conform to others. The behavioral results suggested that trust-related statements were affected by need for cognition score and speaker type. As for the EEG results, the pro-vaccination group demonstrated a delayed N400-like response to the COVID- dissident's statements mismatching her public opinion, while anti-vaccination group demonstrated a similar N400-like response to the medical doctor's deepfakes statements mismatching his public opinion, reflecting unexpected, but attitude-supportive information.