Monday, 1 October 2018 at 6pm

EIT Taradale
Lecture Theatre 2

Professor Maryanne Garry,
NZ Institute of Security and Crime Science,
University of Waikato

Admission: gold coin donation

The Trouble with Memory

Most people think memory is a faithful recorder and archiver of experience. But memory is a liar, a con artist, and a self-serving autobiographer. Memory causes trouble for us, and for others. Yet without memory, we couldn’t function, and our institutions would collapse. In this lecture, Professor Garry will present some of the science of memory, and talk about when and how memory causes trouble.

Maryanne Garry received her PhD in 1993 from the University of Connecticut, and did postdoctoral work at the University of Washington. In 1996 she moved to Victoria University of Wellington, where she worked for 20 years before taking up a joint appointment in 2016 at the University of Waikato, as a Professor of Psychology and a Professor in the New Zealand Institute for Security and Crime Science (one of only two in the world) at The University of Waikato.

She studies a puzzle of memory: how is that otherwise intelligent, rational people can remember things they never really saw, or experiences they never really had? Over the years, she has amassed a solid body of theoretically-grounded applied research that helps us shed light on the causes and consequences of these false memories. Her work has been funded by granting agencies in the US, Japan, and in New Zealand, where she has been awarded four Marsden grants from the Royal Society.