Reconstructive memory

- Bartlett 1932 argued that memories are not reproductions but reconstructions, hence reconstructive memory
- He saw memory as an active process in which we store fragments
information.
- When we need to recall something we build (reconstruct) these fragments into a meaningful whole
- The result is that some
elements are missing, some are distorted, and memory is not a
completely accurate record of what happened.

- Bartlett demonstrated reconstructive memory in a famous study.
- He showed his British participants a story, the War of the Ghosts, a folk tale from a very different culture (Native American), so it would have been unfamiliar.
- He showed participants the story on the left and asked them
to reproduce it 15 minutes later.
- Then Bartlett showed the new version to another person and asked them to recall it a short time later, and repeated this chain with further participants - a technique called serial reproduction
- He found that the story was transformed over time. For example. it became shorter through omissions (unfamiliar details were left out) also
phrases were altered to match the participants' own culture (Bartlett
called these rationalisations, e.g. 'canoe' frequently became 'boat
- These reconstructions were not random - they had the effect of making the story more conventional

- Bartlett believed that what we remember is governed by our schemas
- A schema is a mental structure in memory, a containing all our
stored knowledge of aspects of the world (people, situations, objects
actions, events, abstract concepts, etc.).
- The schema allows us
to process information about the situation (and the social world) more
efficiently by making some guesses about what the situation is probably
like, based on past experience (e.g. what usually happens in a typical
lesson).
- Schemas can be changed by new knowledge and experiences. For
example, you will probably make several assumptions about what happened but with a new experience your schema will adapt new expectations

- Schemas influence memory in two main ways - what you encode/store
and what you retrieve.
- New knowledge that conflicts with an existing schema could easily fail to be encoded in the first place - when you try to recall a memory, you might recall only those elements that fit in with the relevant schema.
- Other elements that don't fit are either forgotten altogether or are recalled in a distorted form
- This is what happened in Bartlett's War of the Ghosts study. The
foreign' nature of the story meant that large parts of it simply didn't
match the British participants' view of the world (their schemas).
- Whenever this happened, memories became distorted, unfamiliar details were left out, and familiar details were elaborated to fill the gaps