reconstructive memory

• "canoe" turned into "boat"
• "hunting seals" turned into "fishing"
• Bartlett maintained that memory is not like a tape recorder
• memory is not perfectly formed, encoded then retrieved, Bartlett thought that past and current experiences of individuals would affect their memory for events
• input

  perception of an event
• processing

  includes the perception and the interpretation of the event
• what are schemata

  schemata are ideas and scripts about the world, they give expectations and rules about what to do and how to behave
• memory of an event involves info from specific traces encoded at the time of an event and ideas that a person has from knowledge, expectations, beliefs and attitudes
• remembering involves retrieving knwoledge that has been altered to fit with the knowledge that the person already has
• what kind of story did Bartlett use?

  native american folklore story that was unfamiliar to participants as not from there culture
• when were participants first asked to recall the story?

  after fifteen mins and then whenever they had chance
• rationalisation

  participants tried to make things make sense, dying at 'sun-rose' became dying at sunset, ideas conformed with common ideas
• confabulation

  participants made things up to fill gaps in their memory
• story became shorter and shorter, went from 330 words to 180
• one participants recalled the study two and a half years after
• results showed that changes that began in the first reproduction became more pronounced over time
• strength of reconstructive memory

  credibility as Loftus and Palmer also found memory to be unreliable, developed the idea that eye witness testimony is unreliable, she claims witnesses reconstruct their memories to fit with their schemas, showed this through the use of leading questions
• weakness of Loftus and Palmer

  task lacked validity as was artificial, artificial environment so cannot be easily applied to real-life
• conflicting evidence

  Treyan and Brewer found participants were more likely to recall strange objects such as a skull when they were asked to recall items from an office, contradicts the idea that we use schemas to recall memories
• application strength

  can be usefully applied to key quesions in society, more hollistic approach than other theories, takes into account individual differences