Every day, millions of people scroll through videos on TikTok, Instagram Reels or Facebook Shorts. Some show banal everyday scenes, others spectacular or almost impossible to believe images. Now, a growing share of this content is generated by artificial intelligence (AI). And the more efficient the tools become, the more difficult it becomes to distinguish true from false. This new reality raises a question that is still little studied: does the simple fact of believing that a video could be created by AI modify our cognitive functioning?
This summer, an interdisciplinary team from the University of Montreal will attempt to answer this question through an experiment carried out at the Neurothèque. The project, led by André Gaudreault, professor in the Department of History of Art, Cinema and Audiovisual Media, and Marie-Odile Demay-Degoustine, research associate at Laboratoire CinéMédias, in collaboration with Karim Jerbi, professor in the Department of Psychology, combines neuroscience, cognitive psychology and cinematographic studies to analyze the effect of AI-generated content on attention and cognitive load. To do this, he can count on an intersectoral team bringing together research assistants Tanzia Mobarak and William Pedneault-Pouliot, affiliated with the CinéMédias Laboratory, as well as research assistants from the UdeM Cognitive and Computational Neurosciences Laboratory Myriam Sahraoui and Sina Esmaeili.
Using electroencephalography headsets, analysis of eye movements and various physiological measurements, researchers hope to better understand what happens in our brains when we watch videos whose authenticity becomes uncertain.