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 13^th 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

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The Center for Cognitive Science at the RPTU Kaiserslautern-Landau is pleased to invite you to the 4th workshop of the Society for the Cognitive Science of Culture to be held on October 1-2, 2021 (Friday and Saturday).

The workshop will take place as a hybrid event; invited speakers will attend the workshop in person, but the talks will be streamed in live via Zoom so that anyone interested can follow the event from home.

Invited talks:

• Susana Araújo (University of Lisbon, Portugal; Universidade do Algarve, Portugal)
• Jon Adoni Duñabeitia (Universidad Nebrija, Spain; The Arctic University of Norway)

• Zohar Eviatar (University of Haifa, Israel)
• São Luís Castro (University of Porto, Portugal; ISCTE-IUL, Portugal)
• Tânia Fernandes (University of Lisbon, Portugal)

• Alexis Hervais-Adelman (University of Zurich, Switzerland)
• Falk Huettig (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Netherlands; Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands)

• Régine Kolinsky (Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium)
• Thomas Lachmann (RPTU Kaiserslautern-Landau, Germany; Universidad Nebrija, Spain)
• José Morais (Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium)
• Manuel Perea (Universitat de València, Spain; Universidad Nebrija, Spain)

• Alexandra Reis (Universidade do Algarve, Portugal)
• David Share (University of Haifa, Israel)
• Mithun Haridas (Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham University, Kerala, India)

Organization:

• Thomas Lachmann
• Réka Vágvölgyi
• Kirstin Bergström
• Aleksandar Bulajić

Program Committee:

• Daniela Czernochowski
• Shanley Allen
• Falk Huettig
• Maria Klatte
• Thomas Lachmann

In the case of organizational or technical issues, please contact Réka Vágvölgyi: reka.vagvoelgyi[at]sowi.uni-kl.de