Factors affecting memory

• According to Bartlett, LTM is based around clusters if related meaningful information - schemas
• Schemas are à concert that people derive from life experience and which is influenced by their culture
• When taking in new information to LTM a person tries to make sense of it. This can be seen as an effort to connect it to their existing schema fir that concept
• When information is bizarre or unfamiliar this process can cause it to be distorted by making it more similar to the existing schema
• The War of the Ghosts Study

  • Bartlett wanted to find out if a person’s memory for stories was affected by their schemas
  • a native americans folk story called the War of Ghosts was told to the participants
  • Bartlett later analysed their responses when they were later asked to remember it
  • the story was unfamiliar to their culture, so it was hard for them to remember
• Bartlett noted four types of mistakes:

  1. Additions - participants added new material to help it make more sense to them
  2. Subtractions - participants forgot sections that they hadn’t understood
  3. Tranformation it familiar - partcpants changed things to make them more similar to what they were used to
  4. Preservation of detached detail - certain unusual details that ad caught people’s attention were recalled, but nit always in the right order, and unconnected to their original context
• Bartlett conclusion:

  • The ideas from the story were forgotten or distorted because participants didn’t have te cultural schemas in their LTM to which to connect the new information
  • Additions demonstrated the use of the particpants‘ own cultural schemas during the retrieval process
• Bartlett saw encding and retervial as an active process of building up a new memory, motivated by the desire to understand
• Bartlett developed reconstructive memory
• Reconstructive memory: memories often have gaps in them and that people use their existing schema knowledge to fill these gaps when they are retrieving a memory
• Effort after meaning: describes the way people try to make sense of new information, distorting if necessary