Albert Wolters Lecture 2018 - Professor Elizabeth Loftus

The lecture was given by Professor Elizabeth Loftus, who has been awarded the prestigious Albert Wolters Visiting Distinguished Professorship by the School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences. Elizabeth Loftus is a major figure in psychology and social behaviour and a professor of law.

Professor Loftus will discuss “rich false memories”. Her research group has explored tampering with people’s memories, changing the details of events that someone actually experienced or planting entire memories for events that never happened. If false memories can be so readily planted in the mind, do we need to think about “regulating” this mind technology?

“Just because someone thinks they remember something in detail, with confidence and with emotion, does not mean that it actually happened, ... False memories have these characteristics too.”