You are cordially invited to the Seminar organized by the Psychology Department.
Date & Time: October 25, 2024; Friday at 12:30
Place: A-130
The presentation language will be English.
Presenter: Asst. Prof. Miri Besken, Ph.D., Psychology Department, Bilkent University
Title:
Can You See it Clearly Now: The Effects of Perceptual Disfluency on the Integration of Misinformation to Eyewitness Testimony
Abstract:
The Post-Event Misinformation Paradigm explores how misleading information introduced after an event can distort or alter memory of the original experience. A key factor in determining an individual’s susceptibility to such misinformation is the quality of encoding during the initial event.
In this presentation, I will discuss a series of experiments conducted in our lab, investigating whether the perceptual clarity of an event at the time of encoding affects the likelihood of integrating inaccurate post-event information. Participants were exposed to picture stories with varying levels of visual clarity—either clear (fluent) or unclear (disfluent) content—followed by a misinformation phase, where altered details were introduced into the same story. Subsequently, participants’ memory for the original, unaltered stories for these events was assessed through multiple-choice questions. We examined both the accuracy of eyewitness memory and the extent to which misinformation was integrated into memories of the original event across clear and unclear visual conditions.
As I present the results of this study, I will discuss the theoretical implications for understanding memory distortion, as well as the applied relevance of these findings in legal contexts—particularly in cases where eyewitnesses may have had a limited or unclear perception of a critical event.
Bio:
Miri Besken is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Bilkent University. She earned her Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, following a B.S. in Psychology from Middle East Technical University and an M.A. in Developmental Psychology from Koç University. Prior to her position at Bilkent, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Heinrich Heine Universität in Düsseldorf, Germany. Her research interests center on the intersection of memory, learning, and metacognitive processes, particularly in healthy young adults. Her work has been published in prestigious journals such as The Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition; Memory & Cognition; and Memory. She has also received grants from TÜBİTAK to support her research.