Older Adults With Cognitive Impairment Can Correct COVID-19 Health-Related Misconceptions

Misconceptions are a major cause of poor health through adverse health-related decisions and behavior, yet common techniques to refute these beliefs may be ineffective for older adults and/or difficult to implement. Based on well-established methods from cognitive science, we tested the short- and long-term effectiveness of a simple learning method to dispel misconceptions related to COVID-19 in older adults with and without cognitive impairment.

Participants rated COVID-19 misconceptions as either true/false or yes/no, remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic. Immediately following the pretest of misconceptions, participants received feedback about their responses consisting of the knowledge statement, their answer, the correct answer, and an explanation of the correct answer. A surprise retest of the same statements occurred after 30 min and then again after 1 week. Additional measures including cognitive testing, self-reported mood, and variables related to COVID-19 (e.g., vaccine hesitancy) were also given. Older adults were categorized into two groups (i.e., healthy, impaired) based on recommended cutoffs from a cognitive screener, the MoCA-Blind.

Older adults with cognitive impairment (N = 32) were less knowledgeable about common COVID-19 misconceptions. Despite initial knowledge deficits, older adults with impairment demonstrated equivalent gains on the retests, compared to healthy older adults (N = 31), which was supported by moderate evidence. Groups made significant knowledge gains on the 30 min retest (d = 0.71), and these gains persisted over 1 week. Knowledge updating was not impacted by personal experience with COVID-19 or general vaccine hesitancy.

We demonstrated that a simple learning method can lead to persistent knowledge gains in even older adults with demonstrated cognitive deficits. Adding these novel results to the existing literature suggests that "myth-busting" may be an effective learning technique for people with a range of ages, cognitive abilities, experiences, and beliefs.