Keynote Speakers Archive

Much of digital information literacy was designed with the information seeker in mind. But on the social internet we do not only seek out information – information seeks out us as well, and often arrives missing crucial context.

In this keynote, information literacy expert Mike Caulfield will detail some of the ways in which pre-internet methods have not been suited to this reality, and detail insights that have emerged in the development and implementation of his SIFT methodology for “citizen fact-checking”.

Discussion will include the problem of “just doing the math”, the ways in which emotional reaction can be necessary to fact-checking, and how some of the older study of rumor may provide useful insights into how individuals process online information.

The power of episodic memories is that they bring a past moment into the present, providing opportunities for us to recall details of the experiences, reframe or update the memory, and use the retrieved information to guide our decisions. In these regards, negative and positive memories can be especially powerful: Life’s highs and lows are disproportionately represented in memory, and when they are retrieved, they often impact our current mood and thoughts and influence various forms of behavior.

Research rooted in neuroscience and cognitive psychology has historically focused on memory for negative emotional content. Yet the study of autobiographical memories has highlighted the importance of positive emotional memories, and more recently, cognitive neuroscience methods have begun to clarify why positive memories may show powerful relations to mental wellbeing.

Here, we review the models that have been proposed to explain why emotional memories are long-lasting (durable) and likely to be retrieved (accessible), describing how in overlapping—but distinctly separable—ways, positive and negative memories can be easier to retrieve, and more likely to influence behavior. We end by identifying potential implications of this literature for broader topics related to mental wellbeing, education, and workplace environments.

Rather than reproductive, research has consistently demonstrated that episodic memory is reconstructive in nature. Our experience of remembering episodic events seems to contribute to a cohesive and integrated narrative of our past; however, the cohesion is illusory.

Recollection involves the recombination of different pieces of our past experiences. These experiences, like puzzle pieces from different boxes, may be recombined correctly or incorrectly. Some pieces may be lost, eroded, or become in some other way, unavailable. Yet, when we recollect the past, we are evaluating this reconstructive process. We may monitor the ease with which information comes to mind. We may monitor the salience of specific attributes of a memory. We may consider how our internal states may have affected the quality of our reconstructed memories. And, ultimately, we decide whether these retrieved memories are accurate or inaccurate.

This evaluative process is metacognition, and failures in metacognitive processes contribute to memory reconstruction errors. We may misattribute feelings of familiarity, we may incorrectly evaluate the qualities of memories, or we may fail to exercise control over memory output. Frequently, however, the fallible nature of memory is predictable, and may be minimized, or at least, recognized by the individual. Metacognitive processes are central to understanding memory retrieval successes and failures.

What researchers have considered as evidence for the unreliable nature of memory (e.g., memory distortion, misinformation susceptibility, and even false memory creation), may be due to a failing of metacognitive processes. Therefore, metacognitive monitoring and control processes may serve as the foundation for avoiding the pitfalls of the reconstructive process. Memory is reconstructive. However, knowing this tenet gives us some control over retrieval. Reconstruction does not always need to result in distortion.

Social cognition permits us to communicate and empathize through our assessment of what others know and feel. Yet, our own knowledge and feelings often limit our ability to take another’s perspective, or know how another feels.

Our own knowledge can also limit our ability to recognize our own prior ignorance. These errors occur frequently in children, but also in adults. A challenge for social scientists is to develop tools and methods to study social cognition in children and adults.

I will present work exploring social cognition from preschool to old age. Fusing developmental, cognitive, and learning sciences, this research can benefit researchers, teachers, students, policy makers and parents.

Our lives are boring, or at least repetitive. Oddly enough, this basic fact has been ignored by researchers interested in autobiographical memory. In this article, I summarize a theory, Transition Theory (T²), developed in response to this situation; I also review a project, the Living-in-History project, which motivated it.

In brief, the Living-in-History project demonstrates that public events occasionally play an important role in how people think about their lives. However, this happens only where (and when) these events produce a fundamental and enduring change in the fabric of daily life. T² provides a psychologically tractable formulation for this metaphor.

On this view, the “threads” that constitute the fabric of daily life correspond to mental representations that capture our knowledge of repeatedly encountered people, places, and things and recurring activities. During stable times, these representations are “woven” together by basic associative processes and come to form lifetime periods (i.e., “my college years,” “when I was living in New York,” etc.). These period representations are separated (delineated) by major life transitions.

Transitions are events like relocation or the birth of a child which “change everything.” Follow along with the fabric metaphor, transitional events replace one set of threads (i.e., the frequently encountered, material features of everyday life) with another, and do so in a rapid, exhaustive, and synchronized manner.

Thus, T² contends that autobiographical memory is structured by important life transitions and that major transitions play an important role in organizing memories, regardless of whether they are individual (e.g., immigration) or collective (e.g., war) in nature.

Adele Diamond is the Canada Research Chair Professor of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. She received her B.A. from Swarthmore College Phi Beta Kappa (in Sociology-Anthropology & Psychology), her Ph.D. from Harvard (in Developmental Psychology), and was a postdoctoral fellow at Yale Medical School in Neuroanatomy.

A leader in two fields, psychology and neuroscience, Dr. Diamond is at the forefront of research on the most complex human abilities (collectively called ‘executive functions,’ which include attention, selfcontrol, & reasoning). Her work has changed the medical treatment for two different medical disorders.

Recently Dr. Diamond has turned her attention to the possible roles of play, dance, music, and storytelling in improving executive functions, academic outcomes and mental health.

Movements of the eye are determined by an interaction of low level properties of the stimulus and high level cognitive factors. Typically in eye movement research, the cognitive factors are that are investigated are expectations or schemas for particular types of scene.

I will present three projects demonstrating that social factors also have a substantial contribution to eye movements. In the first, participants watched a video of people giving their views on a sensitive political issue.

One speaker made a potentially offensive remark. If participants believed these remarks could be heard by others, they fixated individuals who were likely to be offended. In a second study, two participants in adjacent cubicles had a discussion over an intercom while they were eye tracked. We found that their gaze coordination was modulated by what each believed the other could see on the computer screen.

In the final set of experiments, we simply showed groups of four stimuli to pairs of participants. We found that that individuals looked at photographs differently if they believed that the other person was looking at the same images as them rather than a set of random symbols.

Together these experiments demonstrate that social forces have a strong effect on perceptual mechanisms. Gaze patterns are determined by what we think others will feel, what we think our conversation partners can see, and simply whether or not we think we are looking alone or with other people.

Maryanne Garry received her Ph.D. 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 or believe things about themselves, or about others, that just aren’t true?

Her work has been funded by granting agencies in the U.S., Japan, and the New Zealand Government through the Marsden Fund, administered by the Royal Society of New Zealand on behalf of the Marsden Fund Council.

In agreement with neuroanatomical evidence, but contrary to conventional feed-forward notions, my colleagues and I hold to a scheme in which perceptions emerge from iterative exchanges between brain regions linked by reentrant pathways.

In this scheme, the brain is seen as a repository of memories in the form of neural networks (cell assemblies and phase sequences) established through Hebbian learning. Those networks are used in cortical reentrant loops to set up moment-to-moment action plans for perceiving objects and for predicting behaviour sequences.

Long-standing problems, including the development of perceptual categories and the “binding” problem, are resolved naturally within this conceptual framework.

I will illustrate this viewpoint with evidence from behavioural manifestations such as visual masking, and electrophysiological evidence from MEG and event-related potentials that provide converging evidence for a reentrant theory of perception and cognition.

Studies of attention, often conducted in artificial laboratory experiments, may have limited validity when performance in the natural world is considered.

For instance, for over two decades, investigations of ‘reflexive’ and ‘volitional’ attention have tended to be grounded in methodologies that do not capture the demands of attention in everyday life.

Recent studies suggest these laboratory investigations have lost touch with real-life contexts and accordingly may generate fundamental misunderstandings regarding the principles of human attention and behavior.

This talk identifies the basic assumptions of laboratory research that has led to this state of affairs, and suggests a new set of assumptions which lead to a new research approach called ‘cognitive ethology’. The implication is that if one is to understand human attention in everyday life, then research needs to be grounded in the natural world and not in experimental paradigms.

Adult second-language (L2) learning is often claimed to be slow and laborious compared to native language (L1) acquisition, but little is known about the rate of L2 word learning.

Here we discuss that adult second-language learners’ brain activity, as measured by event-related potentials (ERPs), discriminated between L2 words and L2 ‘pseudowords’ (word-like letter strings) after just 14 h of classroom instruction.

This occurred even while the learners performed at chance levels when making overt L2 word-nonword judgments, indicating that the early acquisition of some aspects of a new language may be overlooked by current behavioral assessments.

Dr. J. Don Read is Professor of Psychology and Director of the Law and Forensic Psychology Program at Simon Fraser University. Dr. Read received a B.A. degree from the University of British Columbia followed by M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from Kansas State University.

His research investigates eyewitness memory, face recognition, reconstructive memory, recollections of childhood abuse, and long-term autobiographical memory and has been funded by the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, NATO, and the Alberta Law Foundation.

Dr. Read has published some 70 papers and chapters and co-edited four other books including Recollections of Trauma (1997), Eyewitness Memory (1997), and Adult Eyewitness Memory (1994).

Dr. Read was recently the Chair of the Society for Applied Research in Memory and Cognition (1998–2002) and the North American Editor of Applied Cognitive Psychology. He is currently Editorial Board member of Applied Cognitive Psychology, Law and Human Behavior, Legal and Criminological Psychology, and The Oxford Press Psychology and Law Book Series.

Daniel Reisberg is an American academic who is the Patricia and Clifford Lunneborg Professor of Psychology at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. His specialty is cognitive psychology, and he focuses on memory, judgment, and imagery, particularly in relation to emotion.

Reisberg earned his B.A. in psychology and philosophy from Swarthmore College in 1975. He then attended the University of Pennsylvania, obtaining an M.A. in 1976 and a Ph.D. in 1980. Reisberg has been teaching at Reed College since 1986.

Reisberg is the author of The Science of Perception and Memory: A Pragmatic Guide for the Justice System (Oxford University Press). Reisberg also consults widely with the justice community, and occasionally appears in court as an expert witness.