Autobiographical Memory Conference

Last week, on Thursday and Friday I got the opportunity to attend a conference: Social Perspectives On Autobiographical Memory - Memory and Imagination held by Con Amore (the center I am working at). It was held downtown and my PI was nice enough to drive me to the conference and back. About 150 people from all over the world attended. On the first day there were 6 speakers and a poster session. The three speakers in the afternoon were all from Con Amore so I had already heard them present their talks when they were praticing earlier that week. The first three speakers all had done intriguing research in suggestion and false memories in adults and children. The first speaker was my favorite as she was very entertaining and funny, she talked about how her lab used photo shop to insert a childhood photo of the participant into a picture of a hot air balloon so it seemed like they had taken a hot air balloon ride when they were little when in fact they hadn't. The adult participants then came in for three sessions. During the first meeting most of the participants stated that they couldn't remember taking a hot air balloon ride but during the next two sessions they told the examiner about their "false memory" of riding in a hot air balloon adding more detail each time they came, believing that the event had actually happened when they were little.

The second talk was the same idea of false memory but with children. The researchers were examining if repeatedly asking a child about a certain event could cause children to tell a false memory. The researchers also looked at whether the disposition, comforting or distant, of the experimenter asking the child about the memories caused the child to talk about false memories. They found that the more distant the experimenter was, the more the children told false memories in order to try and please the experimenter. They also found that children, especially very young children, will eventually give in to an adults persistence that an event did or did not occur.

The poster sessions were interesting too and I got a chance to talk to some PhD students about there work. There were a lot of little breaks in between everything and man they feed you a lot at conferences. All of the Con Amore center was at the conference which gave me a chance to get to know them better and talk to people in the lab that I hadn't really gotten a chance to talk to before. Especially since we were with each other all day, I didn't leave the hotel till 9:00 pm the first night. Before the conference dinner there was a reception at the Aarhus city hall. The people of Aarhus are very proud of their city hall, which was designed by famed Danish architect and designer Arne Jacobsen, in the 1940's.  

The second day of the conference was pretty much the same as the first except shorter with four speakers instead of six. 

It was such a great experience to go to a conference for the first time and hear what people all over the world are doing research in and getting a chance to learn more about the field of autobiographical memory.

After the conference on Friday night, I went with two other Americans (one is doing her PhD in the Con Amore lab and has lived in Denmark for 5 years and the other one is doing her PhD at Duke but came to visit the center) and got North Carolina BBQ at this American owned restaurant downtown. The BBQ was really good. I have been adjusting nicely to life in Denmark but there is nothing like eating BBQ to make you think of home.