Aim

1. To test whether memory for a story is distorted by the prior knowledge you already hold.
2. To find out whether cultural schemas reshape what is stored and what is retrieved later.

Procedure

1. Bartlett used 20 British participants, made up of 7 women and 13 men.
2. Each participant read a Native American folk tale called The War of the Ghosts twice, and its names, objects and supernatural events were unfamiliar to them.
3. The method was repeated reproduction, meaning the same participant recalled the same story again and again over time, not serial reproduction with a chain of different people.
4. The first reproduction came 15 minutes after reading, and later recalls ranged from 20 hours to almost 10 years with no fixed schedule.

Results

1. The order of events and the main themes of the tale survived the repeated recalls, but the style and the detail did not.
2. 7 of the 20 participants left the title out altogether, and 10 transformed it into something different.
3. Unfamiliar wording was replaced by familiar wording, so "canoes" became "boats".
4. Material that made little sense to a British reader was rationalised into something more acceptable.

Conclusions

1. Bartlett concluded that memory is an active reconstruction guided by cultural schema rather than a faithful copy of what went in.
2. He called the process effort after meaning, because you strain to make unfamiliar material fit something you already understand.

Strengths and weaknesses

1. A strength is that recalling a meaningful folk tale over months and years resembles ordinary remembering far more closely than a list of nonsense syllables does.
2. A second strength is that it takes a more holistic approach to studying memory, because it follows a whole meaningful story rather than isolated fragments.
3. A weakness is that his ideas about how recall alters could be subjective, because Bartlett decided himself what counted as a distortion with no fixed scoring system.
4. A second weakness is that the findings are hard to generalise, because all 20 participants were British and the tale was chosen to be strange to them.

Turning this into marks

1. Name the 20 British participants, the tale read twice, repeated reproduction and the first recall at 15 minutes.
2. Give a specific distortion, such as 7 of the 20 leaving the title out or "canoes" becoming "boats".
3. Tie any judgement to a feature of this study, such as the lack of a fixed scoring system.