Geosciences, Psychology departments to welcome scholars
Ellen Wohl
This year, the first week of April is setting a new campus standard for the wealth of scholarship offered by so many guest speakers. Among the first to visit Skidmore as invited lecturers are Ellen Wohl, who will give the annual Lester W. Strock Lecture in Geosciences on Monday, April 4, and Maria Zaragoza, who will give a talk on memory confusion, sponsored by the Psychology Department on Tuesday, April 5.
Admission to both is open without charge to the public. Details follow.
-Wohl will present "Seeing the forest and the trees: wood in streams of the Colorado
Front Range," at 8 p.m. April 4 in Davis Auditorium, Palamountain Hall. The Department of Geosciences is sponsoring the talk.
Wohl is a professor of geology at Colorado State University. Her research focuses
on form and process in rivers, particularly mountain streams and bedrock canyons,
and her field research has taken her to every continent but Antarctica. She has written
nine books and numerous technical papers
She received her Ph.D. degree from the University of Arizona in 1988 and joined the CSU faculty in 1989.
Skidmore's annual Lester W. Strock Lecture was endowed by the late Dr. Lester W. Strock, a Pennsylvania-born geochemist and the world's foremost authority on Saratoga's mineral springs. Strock, who died in 1982, spent much of his distinguished career in research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and with the Sylvania Electric Co.
-Maria Zaragoza, professor and chair of the Psychology Department at Kent State University, will present "Forced Confabulations and Memory Confusion" at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, April 5, in Davis Auditorium, Palamountain Hall.
Maria Zaragoza
An expert in memory and cognition, her current research focuses on understanding the cognitive mechanisms that contribute to the creation of false memories for fabricated events. For example, interviewers (in laboratory settings or forensic contexts) may press individuals to describe events that the interviewers believe occurred when the people called upon to provide descriptions did not witness the events they are asked to describe. Later, these acts of description may result in false memories for some of the events.
Dr. Zaragoza's talk will focus on some of the ways in which people come to develop these false (or inaccurate) memories.
The research talk is sponsored by the National Science Foundation (BCS Grant 102389), Skidmore's Department of Psychology, and the Skidmore-Union SUN ADVANCE Network Project.