How well can you trust your memory? If you’ve ever met with Distinguished Professor Elizabeth Loftus, the answer to that might be, less well than you would think.
Loftus is known for her work planting “false memories” in the minds of her subjects. For science, of course.
Free talk Sept. 8 at LSC
A distinguished professor of social ecology, professor of law, and a faculty member in the cognitive science department at the University of California, Irvine, Loftus will be at Colorado State University Sept. 8 to discuss her long and storied research career in the field of memory. Her free public talk is titled “The Memory Factory,” and will take place Thursday, Sept. 8 at 5 p.m. in the Lory Student Center Theater.
“For several decades, I have been manufacturing memories in unsuspecting minds,” she wrote about her upcoming lecture. “Sometimes it involves changing details of events that someone actually experienced. Other times it involves planting entire memories of events that never happened.” She has discovered that not only do these memories persist in people’s minds, but they also look an awful lot like real memories – “in terms of behavioral characteristics, emotionality, and neural signatures,” she noted.
Her work has had major implications for how we think about memory, but also in its applications in society, such as potential for the creation of incorrect “repressed memories” through therapy as well as the reliability of eyewitness testimony in the criminal justice system. “Loftus has done more than any other researcher to document the unreliability of memory in experimental settings,” Nature noted in 2013.
CSU memory researchers
Loftus’s research dovetails with other aspects of memory research by CSU’s own faculty in the Department of Psychology, such as Professor Anne Cleary, who studies memory phenomena including déjà vu and tip-of-the-tongue experiences. And Associate Professor Matthew Rhodes examines perceptions of our own memory on how we recall things.
Loftus is the recipient of the Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement in the Science of Psychology by the American Psychological Foundation, among numerous other accolades. Her talk is co-sponsored by the College of Natural Sciences’ Department of Psychology, Psi Chi National Honor Society in Psychology, Women in Natural Sciences, and the Associated Students of CSU.
