News Detail

Geoff Loftus’ farewell lecture, on November 1st, is the subject of a Daily news article.

UW psychology professor Geoff Loftus presents his farewell lecture on the equivalence principle

Charlie White, Nov 6, 2017

Geoffrey Loftus’s 45 year career with the UW psychology department will come to an end after this quarter. Within the department, he specialized in visual perception, relations between low-level visual and higher-order cognitive processing, and accuracy in recognition memory, among other things.

During his retirement, Loftus plans to work with the Fairbanks Police Department, providing expert testimony in homicide investigations. An event on Nov. 1 in which Loftus joined with Stanford University colleague, Brian Wandell, commemorated his time at the UW, which began in 1972. Members of the psychology department and a general audience joined together to listen in on a presentation he called “Measuring Passage of Time, the Height of the Trees, and Rates of Forgetting.”

Loftus began by acknowledging that respected science relies on observed data and measurement, but is particularly hard to obtain in psychology because of the abstract nature of much of the results. Often times, the measurement which is desired in a study is inconsistent with what is actually measured because the latter is impossible to quantify.

Read the entire article here .