The effect of self construal on Visual Mandela Effect with a metacognitive perspective

The Visual Mandela Effect (VME) refers to collegial misremembering of popular images. For now, it is still not entirely clear why this phenomenon occurs. Visual memory has been given as a possible cause, but visual attention, which may affect this phenomenon, has not been studied. In this context, the effect of self-construal, which is related to visual attention, has been investigated on the VME. The sample of the study is based on voluntary participation and consists of adults between the ages of 18-35. The data of a total of 221 participants were evaluated by considering the exclusion criteria. Participants were primed with either interdependent, independent self-construal or control conditions. Participants were presented with focally and globally manipulated and original popular images and asked to choose the correct image. In addition to this, the reaction time, confidence rating about the answers and the reaction times of confidence rating were measured. Visual manipulations differed significantly from each other in four separate measures: in local manipulations, participants made more mistakes than holistic manipulations, and the degree of confidence in the answers was higher. On the other hand, participants examined holistic manipulations longer than local manipulations and spent more time answering their confidence rating. The effect of the self-construal was only in the reaction time in the confidence ratings: the independent self-construal group spent more time on the confidence rating of the local manipulations, while the interdependent self-construal group spent significantly more time on both visual manipulations. Six images of VME, five local and one holistic, were found. The study showed the effect of visual manipulations on VME and gave information about the relationship of metacognitive structures with self-construal based on visual manipulations. The strengths, limitations and contributions of the research are discussed together with the literature.