Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by Misia Temler , project coordinator of the recently launched Not Guilty Sydney Exoneration Project at the University of Sydney. She recently completed her PhD in Cognitive Science at Macquarie University in the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders . Her PhD dissertation was on how individual and social factors impact autobiographical memory variation across retellings.  In my last post , I discussed the general reconstructive nature of autobiographical memory. In this post I discuss the powerful effect of social influence on memory and summarise a study from my thesis.  Remembering with others can lead to the development of false memories. When individuals witness an event and then remember the event together they can change one another’s memory of what happened (Paterson & Kemp, 2006 ; Wright, Memon, Skagerberg & Gabbert, 2009 ). This has significant consequences in the forensic setting. Eyewitness memory distor...

The 2016 edition of the Arts and Science Festival at the University of Birmingham , whose theme was memory and forgetting, took place between 14th and 20th March.  The festival showcased research and collaboration at the University through talks, exhibitions, performances, workshops and screenings. Project  PERFECT and the Costs and Benefits of Optimism project hosted a lunchtime event open to the public, Tricked by Memory, organised and chaired by Lisa Bortolotti.  The talk by Magdalena Antrobus (pictured below) was entitled: "Sometimes I get lucky and forget. Depression, memory and negativity bias". First, she explored the relation between depression and the way we remember things. Magdalena discussed the phenomenon of depressive realism and asked whether suffering from low mood may enhance the accuracy of our memories. Second, she presented evidence suggesting that in severe forms of depression people remember their past in an overly negative way: they concen...

Caroline Watt This post is by Caroline Watt , Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Edinburgh. Almost 30 years ago, I became a founder member of the Koestler Parapsychology Unit . Based in the Psychology department of Edinburgh University, the KPU studies paranormal beliefs and experiences. Our work includes testing for psychic ability under controlled conditions, and investigating the psychology of paranormal beliefs and experiences. For the last few years, I have been studying precognitive dreaming. The belief that one's dreams predict future events is one of the more commonly reported paranormal experiences and we have investigated psychological factors that have been proposed to lead to seemingly precognitive experiences. We have looked at the role of memory bias in these experiences: specifically, the selective recall of matches and mismatches between dreams and subsequent events. Our participants remembered more than twice as many dreams that matched events ...