PUBLIC TALK: How Remembering Causes Forgetting

Humans rely on memory at nearly every moment: we use our memories of the past to predict the future, and memory is essential to our concept of self. Nevertheless, our memory for the details of events is imperfect. Some details of an event are forgotten and other details can be falsely remembered. One other striking characteristic of memory is that that act of remembering can change what is being remembered: retrieving events from memory changes our memory of those individual events.

In this talk Professor Amy Criss, Head of Discipline of Psychology at Syracuse University and 2018 UWA Institute of Advanced Studies Visiting Fellow, will explain how the effects of retrieval on memory can be understood using carefully designed experiments, and show that the accuracy of memory for an event declines as we repeatedly recall that event. She will also discuss how theories of memory can be expressed as computational models, and how we can use computational models to understand how forgetting is caused by remembering.