reconstructive memory

Bartlett (1932)

Aim of the study was to investigate how the memory of a story is affected by previous knowledge

Bartlett told participants the story War of the Ghosts

There were two conditions:

Repeated reproduction: they heard the story and were told to reproduce it after a short time, and to then do it over a period of days, weeks, months, or years.

Serial reproduction: recall the story and repeat it to another person

There were no significant difference between the way participants recalled the story

Disstortion: changing the story whilst trying to recall it

Assimilation: story became more consistent with the participants cultural norms

leveling: story became shorter

sharpening: tended to change the order of the story

Remembering is not passive but is rather an active process, from previous knowledge.

The participants didn’t receive standardized instructions and no standardized time they had to recall the story in.

Brewer and Treyens

aim of the study was to investigate the role of schema in the encoding and retrieval of episodic memory.

The participants were 86 university psychology students

They were seated in a room that was made to look like a stereotypical office.

Each participant was asked to wait in the professors office whilst the researcher checked to see if the previous participant completed the experiment.

35 seconds later the participants were called into the other room and then asked what they remembered from the office

They were given a questionnaire, where they got asked if they thought they would be asked to remember the objects. 93% said no.

recall condition: asked to describe what they saw as if they were describing it to someone who had never seen or been inside the room.

drawing condition: they were given an outline of the room and had to draw objects they remembered.

verbal recognition: they were read a lit of objects and had to say if the objects were in the room or not.

When the participants were asked to recall the objects by writing or drawing, they were more likely to remember the objects.

They either changed the placement or shape of the objects in order to match their schemas to what would personally make sense to have in an office to them.

There were ethical concerns since they weren’t told what the experiment would be about.

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