Dr Celia Harris (Western Sydney University)

Abstract

Theoretical approaches from philosophy and cognitive science emphasise how experience, cognition, memory, and self are embedded within and distributed among the social and material environment. This ‘scaffolding’ perspective implies that the characteristics of the social and material environment are critical for cognition. This perspective provides new avenues for supporting people to age well, by maintaining and even enhancing cognitive, psychological, and social functioning. In this talk, I discuss evidence from lab-based and field-based research on the ways in which the social and material environment can support memory as we age, including recent extensions to interventions within aged care.

Bio

Celia Harris is Vice Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellow at the MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour, and Development at Western Sydney University. She was awarded her PhD in 2010 from Macquarie University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Centre on Autobiographical Memory Research at Aarhus University, Denmark, before returning to Macquarie as a Macquarie University Research Fellow and then an ARC Discovery Early Career Research Fellow. Celia’s research focuses on memory in context, aiming to better understand the processes involved in bringing memories to mind and how memory retrieval can be supported by our social and technological environment. She aims to use new knowledge of retrieval mechanisms to develop innovative ways of supporting memory in contexts where it is needed most, like aged care and dementia care settings.