The Denison University Psychology Department is sponsoring a research colloquium to be presented by Professor Maria S. Zaragoza, chair of the psychology department at Kent State University and a leading researcher on the fallibility of adults' and children's eyewitness memory. The title of her presentation is "Forced Confabulation and False Eyewitness Memories: The Role of Uncertainty Monitoring." The colloquium, which is free and open to the public, will be at 4:30 p.m. on Tuesday (April 13) in Burton-Morgan Lecture Hall (Room 115).

Zaragoza is a cognitive psychologist with research interests in memory. She is especially interested in source monitoring (the cognitive processes by which people identify the origins of their memories), the determinants of the phenomenal experience of remembering, and the application of theories regarding these processes to the suggestibility of eyewitness memory.

Over the past 20 years, Zaragoza has investigated the psychological factors that shape, influence, and distort eyewitness identification and testimony. Her research has also examined age differences in susceptibility to false memory and children's memory for criminal eyewitness events. Her research and publications have made an important contribution to social science and legal research as well as forensic analysis and practice. Zaragoza is the author of numerous research articles published in leading experimental psychology journals includingJournal of Experimental Psychology, Memory and Cognition, Child Development, and Legal and Criminological Psychology. She earned her bachelor's degree at Florida International University and her master's and doctoral degrees at John Hopkins University.

Each year Denison's psychology department, with the assistance of student members in Psi Chi (the undergraduate national psychology honorary), hosts a series of research colloquia and invites to campus outstanding scholars from various psychological specialties. While visiting Denison, Zaragoza will also have a research discussion with students taking a course in "Cognitive Psychology" and will provide information to students on the graduate psychology program at Kent State University.

About Denison:

Denison University, founded in 1831, is an independent, residential liberal arts institution located in Granville, Ohio. A highly selective college enrolling 2,100 full-time undergraduate students from all 50 states and dozens of foreign countries, Denison is a place where innovative faculty and motivated students collaborate in rigorous scholarship, civic engagement and the cultivation of independent thinking.

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