reconstructive memory

Cards (7)

  • Bartlett suggests that our memory is like an “imaginative reconstruction” of the past events influenced by our attitudes and responses to the events at the time. We tend to reconstruct our memory based on our schema which is made up of all our previous experiences and expectations of an event. We use our schema to reconstruct memories based on what usually happens, probably happened and what must have happened.
  • Assimilation is when a story becomes more consistent based on the participants own cultural expectations
  • . Levelling is when a story becomes shorter with every retelling as many people tend to leave out information that doesn’t seem to be important.
  • And finally, rationalisation is when participants change the order of events in the story to make more sense of it by using terms that are more familiar to their own culture
  • Bartlett used the ‘War of the Ghosts’ study to demonstrate that memory is reconstructed each time it is recalled. It is rarely accurate, and is prone to distortion, rationalisation, transformation, and simplification. Even recall after several minutes led to errors and these were repeated in subsequent reproductions.
  • A strength is that there’s supporting evidence for the three ways we reconstruct memories from bartletts “war of the ghosts” story where he asked participants to reproduce an unfamiliar story and found that many participants changed the story to fit their own existing knowledge by using assimilation, it was westernised. This supports the theory as it shows that memories were reconstructed based on what they think should’ve happened, and changed some aspects of the story e.g., guns turned into knives to fit their own schema of what probably happened and to fit their cultural expectations
  • A weakness is that further research may show that bartlett may be wrong in saying that memory is reconstructed and therefore distorted upon each recall. Wynn and Logie replicated bartlett “war of the ghosts” with a few changes, he used 1st year psychology students and asked them to recall their first week at university. He found that many of the students could accurately recall the events in order with very few changes even 6 months later. This is a weakness as it shows that real-life situations may be less susceptible to reconstruction than bartlett said.