Reconstructive memory

1. Bartlett (1932) argued that remembering is something you actively do, not a recording you play back.
2. You do not store a complete copy of an event, only fragments of it.
3. Every time you recall the event you rebuild it from those fragments, and you fill the gaps with knowledge you already hold.
4. Because the rebuilding happens fresh each time, the version you produce can drift further from the original with every retelling.

How schemas are formed

1. A schema is a package of organised knowledge about a type of person, object or situation.
2. Schemas are formed through experience, by meeting the same kind of situation over and over.
   1. Each encounter adds to the package, so what a schema stores is what is typical rather than what happened on any one occasion.
3. Your culture shapes your schemas, because the situations you meet repeatedly depend on the society you grow up in.
4. A schema is never finished, and it keeps being adjusted as new experiences come in.

How schemas influence memory

1. Your schemas are at work at every stage, shaping what you notice, what you store and what you rebuild.
2. At the time of the event, a schema steers your attention towards details that fit what you expect.
3. At recall, a schema fills any gap with the detail it expects, so you can report something that was never actually there.
4. Details that clash with the schema tend to be dropped altogether, or quietly changed into something that fits.

Effort after meaning

1. When something you meet does not fit what you already know, you push to make sense of it anyway.
2. Bartlett called this drive to make sense of an unfamiliar event effort after meaning.
3. When something does not quite make sense, you go after its overall meaning instead of its exact details.
4. To reach that meaning you rationalise the odd details, reshaping them into ones your existing schemas can handle.
5. What you recall afterwards is therefore shorter, neater and more familiar than the event itself was.

Evidence for the theory

1. Bartlett tested the theory with War of the Ghosts, an unfamiliar Native American folk tale that he asked 20 British participants to recall repeatedly over time.
2. The order of events and the main themes of the story survived, but the style and the unfamiliar detail did not.
3. Participants turned "canoes" into "boats", 7 of the 20 left out the title and 10 changed it, and strange material was rationalised into something more acceptable.
4. Bartlett concluded that recall had been reshaped by the participants' own cultural schemas, which is exactly what reconstructive memory predicts.

Strengths of the theory

1. It is supported directly by Bartlett's own findings, where recall shifted towards familiar British detail.
2. It explains something a recording account cannot, which is how an honest witness can be completely confident and completely wrong.

Weaknesses of the theory

1. Judging how far a reproduction had been distorted was subjective, because Bartlett decided himself what counted as a change.
2. The theory can also overstate how much memory changes, because in Bartlett's own data the order of events and the main themes came through intact.

Turning this into marks

1. Cover both halves of the theory, how a schema is formed and how it changes what you recall, rather than defining schema twice.
2. In a scenario, name the schema the person is using and then name the exact detail it added or dropped.
3. The mark most often lost is describing the theory beautifully and never touching the scenario in front of you.