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Public opinion polls have shown that beliefs about climate change have become increasingly polarized in the United States. A popular contemporary form of communication relevant to beliefs about climate change involves digital artifacts known as memes. The present study investigated whether memes can influence the assessment of scientific data about climate change, and whether their impact differs between political liberals and conservatives in the United States. In Study 1, we considered three hypotheses about the potential impact of memes on strongly-held politicized beliefs: 1) memes fundamentally serve social functions, and do not actually impact cognitive assessments of objective information; 2) politically incongruent memes will have a “backfire” effect; and 3) memes can indeed change assessments of scientific data about climate change, even for people with strong entering beliefs. We found evidence in support of the hypothesis that memes have the potential to change assessments of scientific information about climate change. Study 2 explored whether different partisan pages that post climate change memes elicit different emotions from their audiences, as well as how climate change is discussed in different ways by those at opposite ends of the political spectrum. 

Neuropsychological investigations with frontal patients have revealed selective deficits in selecting the relational answer to pictorial analogy problems when the correct option is embedded among foils that exhibit high semantic or visual similarity. In contrast, normal age-matched controls solve the same problems with near-perfect accuracy regardless of whether high-similarity foils are present (in the absence of speed pressure). Using more sensitive measures, the present study sought to determine whether or not normal young adults are subject to such interference. Experiment 1 used eye-tracking while participants answered multiple-choice 4-term pictorial analogies. Total looking time was longer for semantically similar foils relative to an irrelevant foil. Experiment 2 presented the same problems in a true/false format with emphasis on rapid responding and found that reaction time to correctly reject false analogies was greater (and errors rates higher) for those based on semantically or visually similar foils. These findings demonstrate that healthy young adults are sensitive to both semantic and visual similarity when solving pictorial analogy problems. Results are interpreted in relation to neurocomputational models of relational processing.