St Martin’s Institute for Higher Education recently hosted another public seminar delivered by visiting UK professors.

For this seminar, Steven Taylor from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), was invited to deliver a speech entitled Memories: Footprints in the Snow.

During the lecture, Dr Taylor addressed the controversial question of whether human beings can actually have completely false memories by calling upon the experiments and research conducted by eminent American cognitive psychologist and expert on human memory Elizabeth Loftus.

Dr Loftus’s research focuses mainly on the analysis of the reliability of eyewitness memory and on the creation and nature of false memories, including recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse.

Taylor honed in on the implications of implanting false memories in other people’s brains from the legal and criminal aspect as well as from the business, commercial, marketing and advertising aspects. The evening proved to be a very interesting and insightful event.