Reza Farivar

I am presently involved in two research programs, both extensions of studies I presented at BBCS'99 (9th annual meeting of the Canadian society for brain, behaviour, and cognition, June, 1999).  These two projects are briefly described below.  For more information, please see my papers page, where you can download my papers.

     The goal of one project is to learn more about influences of misleading information on eyewitnesses.  Previous research has shown that when people witness an event and are then exposed to misleading information about the event, they often report the misleading information when asked about event details.  Furthermore, people have difficulties excluding the misleading information, even when told about the false nature of the misleading post-event information.
     The specific goal of my project is to separate aware and unaware influences of misleading post-event information, using the process dissociation procedure (Jacoby, 1991, 1998).  This project is supervised by Dr. Stephen Lindsay at University of Victoria.
 

     The goal of the second project is to understand interactions of item attributes that contribute to definion of the source of the item.  Research suggests that we have separate memory for source than for item.  For example, you may see a word or phrase in the headlines of a newspaper.  Later, when you try to remember the word (the item) you may wish to remember where you saw this word (the source).  In the example of a newspaper headline, a number of characteristics define the source, including the size of the print, the type of print, the location, colour, etc.
     The paper presented at BBCS'99 shows that characteristics that define a source interact in memory, contrary to what multinomial models (see Batchelder & Reifer, 1999) of source monitoring assume.  The project is now attempting to better understand this interaction as well as explore the generalizability of such findings to other source definitions.  This project is supervised by Dr. Helena Kadlec at University of Victoria.