Amanda Barnier,
University of New South Wales
Amanda Barnier is an Australian Research Council
(ARC) Queen Elizabeth II Fellow in the School of Psychology,
University of New South Wales. Her earliest work and
publications focused on hypnosis, hypnosis and memory, and
posthypnotic suggestion.. In recent work and
publications she has extended hypnotic and nonhypnotic experimental
paradigms, such as posthypnotic amnesia, directed
forgetting, and retrieval-induced forgetting to autobiographical
memories. Also, she has focused on personality
factors that influence remembering and forgetting of autobiographical
events. She holds ARC Discovery Grants on inhibitory
processes in autobiographical memory (with Martin Conway)
and on information processing in hypnosis (with Max
Coltheart and Derek Besner). She and John Sutton are just
beginning an interdisciplinary collaboration on
individual and group cognition, focusing on autobiographical memory
and collective memory as a case study.
Sample paper:
'Retrieval-induced
Forgetting of Emotional and Unemotional Autobiographical Memories'
Martin Conway, University of Leeds
Fred
D’Agostino,
University
of Queensland
Fred D'Agostino is Reader in Humanities and Director
of Studies in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Queensland.
He is author of
Free
Public Reason: making it up as we go (OUP, 1996), and of
Incommensurability and
Commensuration:
the common denominators (Ashgate, 2003), both of which assume
and seek to establish that
deliberation is collective and that its collective
nature needs to be expounded in order to be properly invested with
normative elements. He holds an ARC Discovery Grant
for work in collective epistemology, and a Carrick Institute
Leadership Grant to engineer a staff development
program to support curriculum design. This too has a collective
element. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of
the Humanities.
Sample paper:
'What
the Risk-Spreading Argument Suggests about the Organisation of
Scientific Communities'
Maryanne
Garry,
Victoria
University of
Wellington
I'm a Reader in the School of Psychology at Victoria
University of Wellington. My primary interest is in human memory
distortion, and I am especially interested in social
influences on false memories. My students and I have studied how
doctored photographs, placebos, variations in
conversational partners, or just simple real-life occurrences can ramp
up or to dampen down the occurrence of false
memories.
Sample paper:
'Discussion
Affects Memory for True and False Childhood Events'
William Hirst,
The New School for Social Research
William Hirst is currently
Professor of
Psychology at the New
School for Social
Research. He has also held positions
at Cornell
Medical
College, Princeton
University, and Rockefeller University.
His research centers on attention and
memory. In recent
years, he has been
interest on the effect of social influence on memory.
Sample paper:
'On
the Formation of Collective Memories: the role of a dominant narrator'
Emily Holmes,
Oxford University
Emily A Holmes is currently a Royal
Society Dorothy
Hodgkin Fellow (2005-2009) at
the University of Oxford's
Department of Psychiatry.
She is a Clinical
Psychologist and also holds a PhD Cognitive
Neuroscience. Her work
in experimental psychopathology seeks to understand
the
cognitive mechanisms underlying distress in psychological disorder,
e.g. for
intrusive memories. In particular she is interested in the impact of
mental
imagery on emotional processing, and the
impact of processing biases in the way people
interpret
information. Her approach combines
basic experimental research
plus clinical experience in mental
health. This involves
mapping out key features with patients, tailoring experiments on key
variables
in the laboratory and then delineating the theoretical implications for
treatment development. Her
current research
program is investigating psychological
processes in depression, anxiety
and suicidality. The processes of key focus are
mental imagery and
interpretation bias.
Sample paper:
'Trauma
Films, Information Processing, and Intrusive Memory Development'
Kazuo Mori,
Shinshu University
Kaz Mori is Professor of Psychology in the Faculty
of Education, Shinshu University, Japan. He published the first
single-authored Japanese textbook on Cognitive
Psychology in 1995. He is author of an introductory psychology
textbook for junior high school students, as well as
two children's picture books, including a racist free version of
Little Black Sambo. He has published more than 100
papers, but they are mostly 'domestic'. After the invention of the
MORI technique, a presentation trick using
polarizing filters, which can present two different stimuli to
subjects
without them noticing the duality, he has 'debuted'
in the international world at the age of 50. He used the technique
to study memory distortion in eyewitness pairs
who observed nonconforming events and discussed them. He has
conducted similar experiments with different witness
combinations, numbers, and ages. He holds two JSPS Grants
for work in eyewitness research using the MORI
technique. He has recently organized an international meeting in
Japan, in November 2006. He has got another grant
for research in promotion of self-efficacy of students using the
MORI technique. Now, he is preparing to
replicate the Asch experiments in various age groups without
using confederates.
Sample paper:
'Surreptitiously
Projecting Different Movies to Two Subsets of Viewers'
Ross Poole, The New School for Social Research, and the Centre for
Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics
Ross Poole taught at Macquarie
University until 2001 when he
moved to
New York.
He
now teaches in the Philosophy
and Political Science Departments of the New School
for Social Research. He is in Australia
as a Fellow of the Centre
for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics. Ross is the author of Morality and
Modernity (Routledge, 1991) and
Nation and Identity (Routledge,
1999). His interest in collective memory arose from his work on
nationalism and
the
importance of national memories in national
identity, and (a related issue)
the role of national memories in defining present
responsibilities. He is
currently working on a book entitled Doing Justice to the Past.
Sample paper:
'Memory,
History, and the Claims of the Past'
Elaine
Reese,
University
of Otago
My main line of research is on
the
socialization of autobiographical memory. I am particularly interested
in how
parents shape
their children’s style of remembering through
conversations about
the past. To assess this process, I ask parents to talk with
their children
about different kinds of past events: events that both parent and child
experienced, events that only the child
experienced, and events that only the
parent experienced. Then I transcribe the parent-child conversations
and code for
structure (the way parents elicit their child’s
participation in the memory
conversation) and narrative quality (specific narrative
devices parents use
when talking about past events, such as orientations to time, person,
and
place, and emotional/evaluative
references). Usually I study parent-child
remembering longitudinally so that I can explore links across time.
Recently I
have
also begun studying the process using experimental
methods, in which I
train some parents to adopt a more elaborative style
of remembering with their
children, and then examine outcomes for children’s memory and narrative. Using these
methods,
I have explored both
the origins and consequences of children’s autobiographical memory. The
main
antecedents of
autobiographical memory in early childhood appear to
be
children’s self awareness, their language skill, the security of their
attachment to the parent, and their parents’
reminiscing style. Children who
took part in emotionally rich conversations with
parents about the past in early
childhood have a more coherent sense of self by the early school years.
I have
integrated
these findings into a theory of autobiographical
memory development
in Reese 2002 (attached below).
Sample paper:
'Social
Factors in the Development of Autobiographical Memory: the state of the
art'
John Sutton,
Macquarie University
John Sutton is head of the Philosophy Department at
Macquarie Uni, Sydney. He is author of
Philosophy and Memory
Traces: Descartes
to connectionism (CUP, 1998), and coeditor of
Descartes' Natural Philosophy (Routledge,
2000).
He has published on the interdisciplinary study of
memory, distributed cognition and the extended mind, and the history
of science: his current projects are on social
ontology, and on habit and skill memory.
Sample paper:
''Remembering"
Evelyn
Tribble, University of Otago
Evelyn Tribble is Donald
Collie Chair in the Department of English, University of Otago.
She is the author of
Margins
and Marginality: The Printed Page in Early Modern
England (Virginia, 1993) and co-author of Writing
Material:
Readings from Plato to the Digital Age.
Her current research is on memory in the early modern period, using
models
derived from Distributed Cognition and Extended
Mind. Publications resulting from this project include 'Distributing
Cognition in the Globe', Shakespeare
Quarterly 56: 1 (2005) and 'To Ease the Burden of the Brain:
Distributed
Cognition in Early Modern England', SCAN
2:2 (2005). These articles both argue that the
memory in the early modern
period has been consistently misunderstood because
of a tendency to view memory as intracranial rather than distributed.
A related article on Shakespeare and memory,
focusing on the relationship between autobiographical and social memory
in The Tempest, has
just appeared in the special edition of College Literature
(2006) on cognitive Shakespeare.
Sample paper:
'Distributing
Cognition in the Globe'
Qi Wang,
Cornell University
Qi Wang
received her Ph.D. in Psychology at Harvard
University in 2000, and is
currently
an Associate Professor in Human
Development and Cognitive Sciences at Cornell University. Her research
integrates
developmental, cognitive, and sociocultural
perspectives to examine the
mechanisms responsible for the development of autobiographical memory.
She
focuses particularly
on the relationship between autobiographical memory
and
the self as they co-mingle and develop across the lifecourse and in
the context
of culture. She has conducted extensive studies to examine how cultural
self-constructs sustain autobiographical
remembering by affecting information
processing at the level of the individual and by shaping social
practices of
remembering
between individuals (e.g., sharing memory narratives
between
parents and children). These studies illustrate that constructs of
the self
differ across cultures as a function of the social orientations,
cultural
values, and narrative environments in which children
are raised. In turn, such
differences in self-construct have powerful effects on the structure,
content,
and long-term accessibility
of autobiographical memories.
Sample paper:
'The Relations
of Maternal Style and Child Self-Concept to Autobiographical Memories
in Chinese, Chinese
American, and
European American 3-year-olds'
,
University
of Groningen
Ineke Wessel is a member of the
research group
Experimental
Psychotherapy and Psychopathology at the University
of
Groningen, the Netherlands.
Her
PhD project (University
of Maastricht,
UM) involved
examining the effects of attentional
narrowing on memory for emotional
material. As a post-doc (UM) she studied autobiographical memory
specificity in
anxiety
and depression. During her PhD-student and post-doc
years, she was
extensively schooled in methods for modeling clinical
phenomena in the
laboratory in order to test hypotheses about etiological and
maintaining
variables in emotional disorders
(i.e.,
Experimental Psychopathology; EPP).
In general, Wessel’s work reflects a broad interest
in the question
of how people
remember emotional or traumatic events (e.g.,
Flashbulb Memories,
the recovered memory debate, changes in trauma narratives
after therapy).
However, in line with her EPP background, she finds designing
experiments in
order to unravel the mechanisms
that potentially underlie emotion – memory
interactions particularly intriguing. A good example is a recent
experiment in
which
she explored the merits of an explanation in terms
of Retrieval-Induced
Forgetting for the clinical observation that overgeneral
and intrusive memories
co-occur in traumatized patients. A recent research interest involves the role of
inhibitory processes
in
emotional memory. One of the questions in this line
of research is
whether
inhibition paradigms such as Directed Forgetting,
Retrieval-Induced Forgetting
and the Think-No Think task can be successfully applied to emotional
material.
Another question
is whether (pre-morbid) relatively weak cognitive
control
(i.e., inhibition, resistance to interference) is a vulnerability
factor for
enduring intrusive memories of a stressful event.
Sample paper:
'Retrieval-Induced
Forgetting of Autobiographical Memory Details'
Rob Wilson,
University
of Alberta
Rob Wilson is Professor of Philosophy and Director
of the Program in Science, Technology and Society at the University of
Alberta in Edmonton. Originally from Broken
Hill, he grew up there and in Perth, Western Australia, but has lived
in Canada
and the U.S. since 1987. He works in the
philosophy of mind, cognitive science, the philosophy of biology, and
metaphysics,
and is the author most recently of
Boundaries of the Mind (2004) and
Genes and the Agents of Life
(2005), both published
by Cambridge. He is currently working on a
third, related book with the awful working title
Domains of the Social, one of
whose central themes will be the relationship
between cognition and sociality. Other stuff he has in the
pipeline include a paper
on John Searle's view of social reality, a critical
notice of Mohan Matthen's recent book on perception, a paper on
biological
notions of individuality, a paper (with Matt Barker)
on the concept of species cohesion, a series of four papers on
constitution
views in metaphysics, and pair of papers (with Andy
Clark) on the extended mind thesis and the study of the mind and
cognition.
Sample paper:
'Collective
Memory, Group Minds, and the Extended Mind Thesis'
Richard Yeo,
Griffith University
Richard Yeo is an
Australian Professorial Fellow in the Centre for Public Culture and
Ideas, Faculty of Arts, Griffith University,
Brisbane. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy
of the Humanities. He works on the history of science and history of
ideas,
and his books include Defining Science: William
Whewell, Natural Knowledge and Public Debate in Early Victorian Britain
(Cambridge, 1993); Encyclopaedic Visions:
Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge,
2001); and
Science in the Public Sphere: Natural Knowledge in
British Culture, 1800-1860 (Ashgate, 2001). Recent interests include
attitudes to memory and information management among
members of the early Royal Society of London.
Sample paper:
'John Locke's
"New Method" of Commonplacing: managing memory and information'
We have invited some early career researchers, postdoctoral fellows,
and postgraduate students from our departments and labs to join the
discussion:
Kate Devitt,
Rutgers
University
Kate Devitt is a fourth year
graduate
student in the Philosophy Department and Center for Cognitive Science
at Rutgers
University.
She is studying the
philosophy of false memories, mental imagery, pretense and imagination.
Kate’s
work on false memories stems
from David Hume’s claim that the causal link
between experiences in the world and memory is supposed to be so vivid
and
coherent
that people can reliably know whether they are
remembering or merely
imagining a particular event. Recent psychological experiments
contradict
Hume’s optimism and have shown that normal subjects frequently and
vividly
recall fictional, implanted memories as true
autobiographical events in their
lives. Kate’s research investigates the contributions of cognitive
science to
the philosophical discussion
originating in Hume. She argues that the
philosophical issues and empirical findings in the nature of memory
have
important implications
in epistemology and philosophy of mind; especially
the individual
differences that affect the performance of normal adults on memory
tasks.
She
hypothesizes that if cognitive science can establish and predict how
individuals vary in their susceptibility to false memories, then
perhaps they
can pinpoint what cognitive faculties are responsible for them and be
in a
better position to control for their skeptical ramifications.
Kate is particularly interested in the
impact of self-reported mental imagery on individual performances in
memory
tasks. She is investigating
the validity of the Vividness of Visual Imagery
Questionnaire (VVIQ) as a measure of mental imagery and false memory
susceptibility.
She suggests that the VVIQ may not actually measure
mental
images. That is, instead of picking out a resemblence to perception, a
high
‘vividness’
score in the VVIQ may pick out a range
of properties such as coherence, complexity, stability, familiarity and
quantity of
information that are phenomenologically associated
with perceptual
experience. If this is correct, then contrary to intuitive
expectations,
mental
images are not necessary to report a vivid mental experience. Kate is
investigating
whether the VVIQ is subtle enough to identify
the mental processes responsible
for false memory generation.
Sample paper:
'Some
Problems with a Behavioristic Account of Early Group Pretense'
Russell Downham,
Macquarie
University
Gerald Echterhoff, University of Bielefeld
Lauren French,
Victoria
University of
Wellington
Lauren French is a PhD student supervised by Dr
Maryanne Garry. Her main area of interest is false memories, and
especially how
people might incorporate information from other
people's memory reports into their own memory. Lauren is running two
lines of
collaborative memory research. The first is in the
memory implantation area - investigating whether and how siblings might
pass on
entire false memories (of experiences that never
happened) to each other during discussion. The second involves
eyewitness memory;
this research uses the MORI technique to examine
whether people will incorporate elements of each other's memory reports
into
their own memory when they are given the opportunity
to discuss an event they have seen. The focus is to identify what
factors will lead
people to incorporate information from others into
their memory and what factors will protect them from doing so.
Celia Harris,
University
of New South Wales
Celia Harris is a PhD student supervised by Amanda
Barnier
at the
University
of New South Wales.
Celia
has always been interested
in social and cultural influences on behaviour and
cognition, and became interested in autobiographical memory after
working as Dr
Barnier’s research assistant.
Her
PhD
research aims to address fundamental questions about how social factors
influence the way in
which people recall events from their lives.
Empirically, her PhD research aims to extend
existing experimental group recall paradigms
to autobiographical memories, and
to explore the factors that mediate social influences.
One important issue that will be addressed is
whether collaboration has the same effect for shared
and unshared
memories.
This research programme will
also examine the role of
emotional valence, memory significance and the
nature
of the group in determining the way that social remembering influences
individual
memory for autobiographical events.
Michelle Moulds,
University
of New South Wales
Michelle
Moulds is a Clinical Psychologist and Lecturer in the School of Psychology at The University of
New
South Wales (UNSW),
Sydney. Her PhD (awarded 2003) investigated the cognitive processes of individuals with Acute
Stress
Disorder, with a specific focus
on the interrelationship of acute dissociative
responses and memory for traumatic events. More recently, she was a
Postdoctoral Fellow
at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College
London. Her current experimental
and clinical research program
examines cognitive and
memory processes in depressive disorders. Her experimental research
investigates the impact of cognitive processes on memory
unctioning in
depression; specifically, the role of rumination in the maintenance of
established depression-related memory disturbances
such as intrusive memories, overgeneral
autobiographical memory and retrieval biases. The clinical arm of her
research
applies the findings
of this experimental work to the development and
evaluation of a new treatment approach for first episode depression
that
specifically
targets memories of negative past events and aims to
prevent
depression recurrence. Current additional projects explore: the impact
of
rumination on memory in social phobia, the role of
cognitive strategies in reducing
the impact of ostracism, and the identification of
cognitive factors linked to
vulnerability to depression and/or PTSD.
Sample paper:
Directed
forgetting in acute stress disorder
Akira O’Connor,
University
of Leeds
Akira O’Connor is an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded
PhD student at the Institute of Psychological Sciences,
University of Leeds. He is interested in the
neuropsychology of memory, specifically erroneous sensations of memory
such as
déjà vu and déjà vecu.
He is carrying out a programme of research with the aim of
experimentally investigating the déjà vu phenomenon.
Key to this aim is the development of an
experimental technique for the induction of an 'on-demand'
déjà vu experience in non-clinical
participants and Akira is investigating a number of
methodologies involving posthypnotic amnesia and subliminal mere
exposure by
which this may be possible. Akira has previously
investigated metacognition in young adults with Down's syndrome. His
PhD is
supervised by Dr. Chris Moulin and Prof. Martin
Conway and he is a member of the Leeds Memory Group.
Sample poster:
'Déjà
vu: subjective reports of experiential state'
Helen Paterson,
University
of Sydney
Helen
Paterson currently works as a postdoctoral
fellow at the University
of Sydney. Her
research
investigates decision making and
adaptive expertise in stressful
conditions. In particular, she researches
ways to encourage firefighters to learn from the experiences of
others using
error-based training. Helen completed her PhD in psychology at the University of New South Wales in 2005. Her PhD
research investigated the effects of discussion
amongst witnesses on the
accuracy their memories. As part of this research, she conducted
a series of laboratory
experiments as well as surveys of witnesses and police officers.
Sample paper:
'Comparing
Methods of Encountering Post-Event Information: the power of co-witness
suggestion'
Stefanie Sharman,
University
of New South Wales
Stefanie Sharman is a Vice Chancellor's Postdoctoral
Fellow at the University of New South Wales. Her primary interest is in
how people
come to create false memories and false beliefs
about events that they have never experienced but generated through
other methods, such as
imagination. Her most recent research has focused on
the factors that make people more and less susceptible to these false
memories and
beliefs. For example, in one study, she investigated
whether giving people cues that highlighted the origin of the imagined
events would
prevent them from confusing these events with
genuine childhood memories. In her current research, she is
investigating whether people
are more likely to create false memories and beliefs
about events that are consistent with their self-goals and
self-knowledge than events that
are not consistent.
Sample poster:
'Using
Source Cues and Familiarity Cues to Resist Imagination Inflation'
Zachary Steel, University of New South Wales
Penny Wareham,
University
of New South Wales
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John Sutton,
Philosophy Department, Macquarie University, Sydney.
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Last updated 13 July 2006.