Then, participants listened to an audio clip of a “radio host” interviewing a fake employee for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who repeated some of the facts from the article the participants read, but not all of them.

While people were always better at remembering the information that was repeated in the audio clip, since they’d been exposed to it twice, the researchers found that people in the high-risk condition tended to forget more of the other facts—the ones that hadn’t been included in the audio clip—than people in the other group did.

The odd thing is, the high-risk people were more likely to forget information that was related to what the expert was talking about on the radio. So if the CDC expert mentioned the headaches and the rash, for example, the listener would be more likely to forget the other symptoms. But they might still remember the risk factors, or other things unrelated to the symptoms.

This sort of simplification happens when people are remembering previously learned information when listening to someone speak about the same topic. (It’s called “socially shared retrieval-induced forgetting,” if you want to get technical.) Another study, from 2014, found that health messages tend to get condensed the more they’re shared from person to person, and to become less accurate.

And the more a subject is being discussed in the media, the more opportunities there are for these things to happen. People read stories that may emphasize some facts over others, they talk amongst themselves, and they share things on social media, likely leaving a lot of nuance—and sometimes accuracy—by the wayside. Especially if they feel like they’re at risk.

When there’s an outbreak, and people are worried about themselves and their loved ones, this is probably unavoidable to a certain degree. But if reporters, government officials, and everyone else spreading health messages try not to provoke more than the necessary anxiety about a disease, this research suggests people will be more likely to remember the whole picture.