Prof. Garry’s Inaugural

Yesterday attended the inaugural Professorial lecture of Maryanne Garry.
Maryanne started at Victoria University in 1996, which was when I met her, taking her 3rd year class on memory. It was a revelation. Maryanne studied under Beth Loftus and brought with her an extremely lucid presentation of memory issues, namely the unreliability of memory. Much of her research has a focus on false and incorrect memories and what it means to say “I remember”. She quickly got a reputation as a great teacher and a fierce driver of student research. (Stuck to her door at the moment is a bit of student feedback saying something like “Dr Garry is the best lecturer I’ve ever had, she is funny and her lectures are interesting and she also terrifies me so I always pay attention”.)
Inaugural lectures are great. They’re a chance for the new Professor to give a good summary of their work, an overview suitable for a non-specialist audience. The scope of them is really appealing to me. Academic research is always bogged down in detail, because it has to be – the details are crucial. But in an inaugural, there’s the space to zoom out a bit and deliver some solid hits in the clearest way possible. The tone is also always positive and celebratory and a reflection of the academic’s personality. (I remember with fondness the excellently-titled inaugural by David Finkelstein, “I played frisbee with Jesus”. This title was not a metaphor, either, he meant it literally.)
Maryanne’s was neat. Interspersed with lots of digs at the Republican party and George W. Bush (she may have been here for over a decade but her passion for her nation’s politics is undimmed) was a swift trip through three fascinating areas of research.
First was the imagination inflation research (a lot of which was done with Stef Sharman – Maryanne went to a lot of trouble in her address to call out and thank her students). This line of research was just getting underway when I was kicking around Vic doing honours, and it’s since become a pretty solid line of work. Basic message: when you imagine something that might have happened to you, you become more confident that it actually did happen to you. That’s powerful stuff.
The second area she called “the dangers of photoshop”. This research, largely with Kim Wade (known to some around these parts as “wife of Alastair Galloway” – yes, that Kim you guys), found that if you show people a fake photo of kid-them doing something, they very quickly become confident that it did indeed happen, and their accounts become very detailed and convincing. Apparently a common response to being debriefed that it wasn’t real was “whoa, how did you do that? I remember it so clearly!”
The third area is with lots of people and still in early stages, and it’s something quite startling – I’m going to describe it like this: people become more confident about statements if there’s a photo with the statement, even if the photo shouldn’t matter. Like, “the Pope rode a camel” – people are more likely to agree that the Pope did indeed ride a camel if there’s a picture of the Pope not riding a camel. I’m over-simplifying a complex set of data to the point of parody, but if you walk away thinking “photos have an influence over our judgments that they shouldn’t rationally have” then you’ve got the main point.
It was good stuff, with a lovely conclusion about how memory is really about reducing the space between people, about social connectivity. She got a lot of laughs and she got to show off some important research and, yeah, it was good times. So, congrats Professor! Readers who know Maryanne should take this as an excuse to take a wee dram in her honour. I did.