Haaß-Talk 2023: Prof. Dr. Elizabeth Loftus
Haaß-Talk 2023
This year, the prestigious Haass Talk is organized by the Faculty of Social Sciences. It is our great pleasure to announce one of the leading scholars in the field of psychology and law, Prof. Dr. Elizabeth Loftus from the University of California, Irvine. As the world's leading expert on the psychology of eyewitness testimony, her groundbreaking research on the fallibility of eyewitness memories, the distortion of memories over time, and the possibility of creating false memories that cannot be distinguished from genuine ones is known to virtually every student of psychology, sociology, and law around the world. In Kaiserslautern, she will give a one-hour overview of her research over the past few decades and ask whether memory is just a fiction.
Elisabeth F. Loftus (University of California, Irvine)
The Fiction of Memory
For several decades, I have been manufacturing memories in unsuspecting minds. Sometimes, these techniques change details of events that someone actually experienced. Other times, the techniques create entire memories of events that never happened; they create “rich false memories.” Collectively, this work shows that people can be led to believe they did things that would have been rather implausible. They can be led to falsely believe they had experiences that would have been emotional or traumatic had they actually happened. False memories, like true ones, also have consequences for people—affecting their later thoughts, intentions, and behaviors. Can we tell true memories from false ones? In several studies, I created false memories in the minds of people, compared them to true memories, and discovered that once planted, those false memories look very much like true memories. They have similar behavioral characteristics, emotionality, and neural signatures. Considered as a whole, these findings raise important questions: If false memories can be so readily planted in the mind, do we need to think about “regulating” this mind technology? And what do these pseudomemories say about the nature of memory itself?
Thursday, July 13th 2023
HS52-207 (Chemistry Building, ground floor)
3:30-5:00 pm
Entrance starts 3:00 pm
Admission is free of charge. Note, however, that seats are limited. Therefore, we strongly recommend seat reservation by using the following link: Reservation
Online participation:
https://livestream.uni-kl.de/?stream=52-207
Contact: Dr. Ann-Kathrin Beck, akbeck[at]rptu.de