Lab Director
Maryanne Garry received her Ph.D. in 1993 from the University of Connecticut, and did postdoctoral work at the University of Washington. In 1996, she moved to Victoria University of Wellington, where she worked for 20 years before taking up a joint appointment in 2016 at the University of Waikato, as a Professor of Psychology and a Professor in the New Zealand Institute for Security and Crime Science (one of only two in the world) at The University of Waikato. She studies a puzzle of memory: how is that otherwise intelligent, rational people can remember or believe things about themselves, or about others, that just aren’t true? Her work has been funded by granting agencies in the U.S., Japan, and the New Zealand Government through the Marsden Fund, administered by the Royal Society of New Zealand on behalf of the Marsden Fund Council.
Although Dr. Garry’s research is widely cited both in her own discipline and in the allied disciplines of law and clinical psychology, it is also accessible enough to feature in myriad undergraduate textbooks, in popular books written for an educated lay audience, and on numerous television and radio documentaries. Garry has received a university award for Excellence in Research and an award for Excellence in Teaching, and was elected by her peers to the Victoria University of Wellington’s governing board of trustees, the University Council. She received the Neag Distinguished Alumni Research Award from the University of Connecticut. She is a Fellow of the Psychonomics Society, and of the Association for Psychological Science. Garry served for many years on the Governing Board of the Society for Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, including two terms as its president. She also served on the Board of Directors of the Association of Psychological Science, a nonprofit organization of more than 30,000 members dedicated to the advancement of scientific psychology and its representation worldwide.
Postdoc
Mevagh Sanson is a Postdoc. She received her Ph.D. in Psychology in 2018. Dr. Sanson is an expert on relationship between how people remember traumatic experiences and the symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder. She is also interested in related issues, such as the distinction between voluntarily- and involuntarily-retrieved memories, and how people decide what is true in various applied contexts. Her groundbreaking work on "trigger warnings," the content advisory statements that precede negative material, showed these warnings actually have no meaningful effect on distress. Dr. Sanson has received funding from Fulbright New Zealand, the New Zealand Federation of Graduate Women, and the Association for Psychological Science Fund for Teaching and Public Understanding of Psychological Science.
Students
Andrea Taylor is investigating the common misconception that people’s memories for trauma are remembered as a series of jumbled scenes, fragmented, and missing important pieces. In some “corners” of the psychological literature, spurred by observations from therapy, this supposed incoherence is thought to be the result of a special mechanism by which the brain encodes traumatic memories. But in another corner of the psychological literature, evidence from scientific studies does not support these claims. Instead, scientific evidence suggests people’s traumatic memories are just as coherent as their non-traumatic memories—even among people diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder. Over the course of her Ph.D., Andrea has been working at the intersection of cognitive and clinical psychology to reconcile these discrepant findings.
Kayla Jordan is interested in how people become overconfident in their ability to perform highly specialised skills. When we evaluate what we know about the world, we rely on both rational thinking and “gut-level” hunches—sometimes making decisions in the absence of actual knowledge. We know that you can exploit that gut-level hunch, by making it easy for people to bring to mind thoughts, images, and feelings that they confuse for actual knowledge (fluency). To what extent do situations that encourage fluent processing increase people’s confidence in their ability to perform highly specialised skills? Throughout the course of her Ph.D., she will carry out a series of experiments to more precisely identify—and then control—the extent to which cognitive fluency leads people to develop this misplaced overconfidence.
Sarah Hall is a PhD student studying what makes for effective scientific communication.