Bartlett (1932)

• Bartlett’s central insight was that memory is not like a tape recorder: it doesn’t faithfully play back our experiences. Instead, it changes or “reconstructs” them imaginatively.
• Bartlett’s main idea is that our memory is grouped into categories called “schemas”.
• Bartlett argued that we do not remember all that we perceive. We therefore draw on our schema when we recall an event to fill in the gaps. This means that recall is an active reconstruction of an event strongly influenced by previously stored knowledge, expectations and beliefs.
• The ‘War of the Ghosts’ Bartlett (1932) AIM:

  To investigate whether the memory of a story is affected by previous knowledge.

  To find out if cultural background and unfamiliarity with a story would lead to distortion of memory when it was recalled.

  To test if memory is reconstructive and whether people store and retrieve information per expectations formed by cultural schemas.
• Bartlett (1932) PROCEDURE:

  Bartlett used serial reproduction, which is where participants hear a story or see a drawing and are asked to reproduce it after a short time and then to do so again over a period of days, weeks, months or years. The story used was a Native American story called ‘’The War of the Ghosts’’ which was unfamiliar to participants and contained unknown names and concepts.
• Bartlett (1932) PROCEDURE:

  The story content was also unfamiliar. The story was selected because it would test how memory may be reconstructed based on cultural schema. Each participant read the story to themselves twice. The first reproduction happened 15 minutes later. There was no set interval beyond this and participants recalled the story at further intervals from 20 hours to almost 10 years.
• Bartlett (1932) SAMPLE:

  Sample: 20 British participants (7 men, 13 women). The participants were not told the aim of the

  study, they believed they were being tested on the accuracy of recall.
• Bartlett (1932) RESULTS:

  Bartlett found that participants changed the story as they tried to remember it. This happened in

  the early stages (15 minutes) and throughout the further reproductions.

  7 of the 20 participants omitted the title, and 10 of the participants transformed the title, e.g. “War-Ghost story”. Other transformations included changing ‘canoes’ to ‘boats’ and

  changing the names of the characters.
• Bartlett (1932) CONCLUSIONS:

  Accuracy in reproduction of the story is an exception rather than a norm of memory. Style, rhythm

  and precise story construction is very rarely reproduced.

  After repeated reconstructions the form of, and items in, the story became stereotyped and do not change much after this occurs.

  In all recollections of the story, rationalisation reduced material to a form that was more accessible or common to the participant.
• CON of Bartlett (1932): Bartlett used different intervals with participants when asking them to recall ‘The war of the ghosts’ story. Had they been kept the same internal validity would have increased allowing direct comparisons to be made about reconstructive memory. Currently the study lacks scientific rigour.
• PRO of Bartlett (1932): The findings are supported by future research. For example, BArtlett repeated his study design using a further 8 different stories and found the same overall shortening, transformation, familiarisation and omission.
• CON of Bartlett (1932): The study is unscientific. Bartlett had no scoring system for measuring changes in recall other than counting the number of words. This makes his research conclusions subjective.
• Bartlett (1932) generated new research on memory – prior, memory was believed to be a simple reproduction of an event. Bartlett argued this was not realistic as environments are ever changing and we reconstruct memories with the information we have at the time.
• EVALUATION:

  The early study by Bartlett was not scientific. Bartlett did not follow standardised procedures, getting his students to reproduce the story as-and-when. He had no scoring system for measuring changes in recall other than counting the number of words. This makes his research conclusions subjective
• Bartlett (1932) GRAVES; Ecological Validity

  Bartlett’s research was particularly unrealistic, getting Cambridge University students to recall Native American ghost stories. This strange task lacks ecological validity - although Bartlett

  claimed the task had to be strange so as to prompt the participants to level and sharpen the details in their memories.