The correction of health misconceptions in older adults with cognitive impairment

Background The use of a refutational technique (e.g., “myths” versus “facts”) to correct health‐related misconceptions is ubiquitous, yet little work has addressed whether older adults’ cognitive status influences misconception correction. We examined belief in COVID‐19 misconceptions in older individuals with and without cognitive impairment, and whether a simple refutational technique would be effective at reducing misconception belief in these populations. Method Older adults (N = 62, 36 Males) took a pretest of 10 COVID misconceptions (from the CDC) over the telephone. Participants received immediate corrective feedback (i.e., the correct answer and an explanation of the correct answer). Individuals took a surprise retest after 25 minutes and again one week later. Cognitive status was assessed with a telephone‐administered neuropsychological battery and Montreal Cognitive Assessment‐Blind (MoCA‐Blind). Cognitive status groups were compared on misconception belief and corrections. Exploratory analysis correlated corrections with performance on the neuropsychological battery and demographics. Results Older adults (M = 75.26 years, SD = 6.61) were split into a cognitively impaired group (N = 28) and an unimpaired group (N = 34) based on recommended cutoffs for the MoCA‐Blind; these groups did not differ in terms of age or education. Impaired older adults endorsed more misconceptions on the pretest than unimpaired older adults, t(60) = 3.61, p < .001, d = .92. Importantly, both groups made equivalent corrections from the pretest to the first retest (p = .439, d = .21) and maintained those corrections across the one week delay (p = .907, d = .03). Only memory errors on the recognition portion of the neuropsychological battery were associated with performance gains (r = ‐ .33, p < .01). Individuals who made more false alarms (i.e., incorrectly recognizing a word as having been presented) were less likely to correct misconceptions. Conclusion A refutational technique can be effectively used to correct health‐related misconceptions in even older adults who are cognitively impaired. Moreover, this easily‐implementable technique was effective for older adults of all ages and education levels. Rather, recognition memory errors alone were important in the correction of misconceptions.