Why AI Deepfakes Are Changing Human Cognition and Emotional Perception

The instinctual nature of humans has guided them for centuries in their ability to assess the authenticity of things around them. Natural cues in interpersonal communication, such as facial expressions, tone of voice, and physical appearance, help us assess a person’s reliability when interacting with them. In the physical world, those same signals provided us assurance that what we have seen and heard from a digital medium would correlate with reality.

Although AI advancements pose a threat to this foundation, AI-generated Deepfakes have surpassed previous limits on the creation of highly realistic synthetic media, manipulated video clips, and non-original audio recordings, allowing almost indistinguishable imitations of different people in terms of visual appearance and sound.

The evolution of deepfakes will have lasting effects on the way we think and feel about ourselves as humans. The sophisticated nature of these technologies enables them to directly impact our ability to attend to certain things, change our memories, and influence how we decide, based on how our emotions respond to stimuli rather than on logic. As a result, consumers will find themselves increasingly susceptible to accepting the truthfulness of fake content they’re presented with, even though they are aware it may not be honest.

The Growing Impact of Deepfakes on Human Cognition and Emotion

With AI’s ability to analyze facial movements, vocal patterns, and emotional expressions, deepfake technology can accurately imitate individuals and create fake images or videos. Unlike earlier versions that were obvious, deepfake technology has improved so that it can now be used in social media, text messaging, and professional email communication.

Because humans instinctively trust what they see and hear, increased exposure to deepfake technology impacts how people think cognitively and perceive emotions, thus making them more vulnerable to the technology. This increase in vulnerability is not due to a weakness, but a result of how humans are naturally wired to trust what they see and hear.

Knowing that a person’s face is familiar and perceiving that this person holds authority increases the likelihood that an individual will believe the content, indicating that cognitive shortcuts are additional factors that contribute to susceptibility.

How Deepfakes Affect Emotional Cognition and Decision-Making

There is much evidence to support the fact that the psychological ramifications of deepfakes on human beings go beyond mere disbelief. Emotion recognition  plays a huge role in how we make decisions, and deepfakes frequently capitalize on that fact.

• Fear is associated with rapid responses
• Empathy makes us think less critically and, therefore, makes what we see appear more credible
• Anger causes us to react rapidly and share

Neuroscience research provides supporting evidence of the impact of deepfake media on people’s responses to it. EEG data from the research Deepfake Smiles Matters Less reveal that people had different emotional responses to faces identified as AI or not. Deepfake facial expressions elicited lower responses than authentic facial expressions, while negative emotional expressions, such as anger, elicited similar brain responses to both types of faces.

Emotional Nuances Influence Belief

Different emotional cues influence cognition differently. Negative emotions such as anger and fear tend to accelerate belief formation, while positive cues like trust or happiness subtly shape memory and long-term perception. These nuances help explain why some content spreads faster and feels more convincing than others.

Memory Distortion Caused by Deepfakes

In addition to the first impression, Deepfakes also have the potential to distort memory. With continued exposure to falsified video content, it may become difficult to separate false memories from actual experiences, as the lines between these experiences become blurred. This makes misformation more appealing and leads to difficulty in discerning between actual events and fabricated ones.

The article Face/Off: Changing the Face of Movies with Deepfakes (PLOS ONE) explains how severe this danger can be; Approximately 49% of those exposed to altered video clips believed they could recall the event as though it were an actual event, demonstrating that Deepfakes are able to create a false memory that appears to be authentic.

False memories create an increased emotional response and an increased reinforcement of false beliefs. False memories thus create a loop in which the perception, cognition, and emotion of a person are all altered continuously by artificially made video content.

Cognitive Stages Most Impacted by Deepfakes

Deepfakes impact various cognitive processes, over and beyond those of perception.

• Attention: Because realistic imitations draw our attention instantaneously, we have less opportunity to critically analyze the information presented.
• Memory: Due to the fact that our brains rely on both the encoding of the information and its recall, the use of deepfake media can disrupt the processing of information within our brains as well.
• Decision-Making: The arousal of an emotion or the effect of cognitive bias can prevent us from thinking logically about a situation, and the decision-making process becomes clouded.

It is easy to see from this understanding that both visually, aurally, or multimodal deepfakes affect the human brain and also affect the human brain’s ability to determine how the deepfake will affect our cognitive processes.

Why Some People Are More Vulnerable to Deepfakes

Different people react differently to information. Highly Analytical thinkers and Digitally Literate individuals tend to analyze media sources using critical thinking skills, whereas people who rely simply on Intuition or Emotion do not necessarily engage in this level of critical analysis.

People’s Age, Cognitive Availability, and Familiarity with New Technologies are also important factors in their susceptibility. Identifying Vulnerability to Deepfake technology based on individual variability has created the opportunity to raise awareness and implement protective mechanism strategies.

How Deepfakes Erode Trust in Visual and Auditory Signals

Traditionally, visual and auditory cues were seen as reliable indicators to determine authenticity; however, the increase in deepfakes disrupts this notion of reliability. Once synthetic faces and voices are indistinguishable from actual faces and voices, visual/auditory cues become less credible.

Deepfakes create two distinct types of risks:

• False content could easily be accepted because of how realistic it looks,
• Genuine content could easily be dismissed because of the Rise in skepticism associated with digital media.

Both of these effects will erode a shared understanding between people, which will impact how individuals interpret digital reality.

Why Human Review Alone Is No Longer Reliable

Research has demonstrated conclusively that the ability of people to accurately detect deepfakes is extremely limited. Even when people are aware that such things exist, they frequently have an increased level of confidence in deepfake material that appears realistic or provokes an emotional response. Our natural instincts to trust the face of a familiar person, voice, or personality make it increasingly difficult to identify altered video content. 

Because of this, any manual verification of the content or judgment by humans is rendered unreliable. As the technical capabilities of deepfake technology continue to advance, the gap between what humans can identify and what can be produced by AI will continue to grow and become increasingly greater. 

Hence, the application of automated AI verification will no longer be an option but will become a necessary component in providing digital trust through reliable, precise, and effective decision processes.

Strategies for Maintaining Cognitive and Emotional Awareness

To help people manage the growing amount of deepfake technology, we need more than awareness; we need to develop practices for helping individuals build judgment and trust so they can efficiently navigate through false information. Some strategies for achieving this goal include: 

• Practice critical thinking. 
• Verify the authenticity of a source before sharing it or accepting its content. 
• Use available resources to analyze images and videos for inconsistencies, including technical errors and 
• Develop skills to verify the objective information rather than rely on instinct or emotional responses.

How Facia AI Protects Perception and Decision-Making from Deepfakes

The way we view digital media is being altered by deepfakes. The sophistication of contemporary synthetic content is beyond the capabilities of human judgment alone.

To properly address these challenges, organisations require automated, dependable solutions that can verify authenticity at scale. Facia’s solutions are designed specifically for this purpose. Its AI-powered deepfake detection solution detects distorted videos and images across platforms, assisting organisations in stopping misinformation and synthetic media before it spreads.

Its liveness detection system assures that a real person is present in front of the camera, protecting onboarding flows and identity checks against deepfakes and spoofing attacks.

These solutions together empower organisations to safeguard trust, improve decision-making, and secure digital interactions in an age where synthetic media is becoming increasingly difficult to detect with the human eye.

Book a demo with Facia AI and start protecting your digital content from deepfakes today.