Reconstructive memory
Definition
Reconstructive memory
The idea that remembering is an active rebuilding of an event rather than the replay of an exact recording, so what you recall can be shaped and changed each time.
- Bartlett argued that remembering is an active rebuilding of an event.
- Each time a person remembers an event, they rebuild it from stored fragments.
- Because the event is rebuilt, the version produced can shift a little further from the original with every retelling.
- Two things guide that rebuilding: schemas and effort after meaning.
Key Idea
- Remembering builds an event again out of stored fragments, and whatever is missing gets filled in from what you already expect.
- That is why an account grows neater with each retelling, and why you can picture a kettle in a kitchen that only had a coffee machine.
- The details your knowledge supplies feel as vivid as the ones that were really there, so confidence is no guide to accuracy.
Effort after meaning
Definition
Effort after meaning
Bartlett's term for our tendency to focus on the overall meaning of an event and reshape unfamiliar details so they fit what already makes sense to us.
- When something does not quite make sense, a person reaches for its overall meaning.
- To reach that meaning, unfamiliar details are changed into ones the person already understands.
- The story that is recalled ends up neater, more sensible and more familiar than the event was.
Example
- A friend gives a rambling account of a journey home involving three replacement buses and a missed connection at Crewe.
- A week later you retell it as the familiar complaint that the trains were a mess again, dropping the odd details you could not place.
- That smoothing towards a familiar story is effort after meaning reshaping the memory.
Schemas and experience
Definition
Schema
A package of organised prior knowledge about a person, object or situation, built up from experience, that guides what you expect, notice and remember.
- A schema is a package of organised prior knowledge about a type of person, object or situation, such as what usually happens in a classroom or a restaurant.
- Each schema is built slowly, out of repeated experience of that kind of situation.
- The schema stores the details that are usually expected to be present, such as a till and a queue in a shop.
- When a new event comes along, a person makes sense of it by matching it to the nearest schema they already have.
- What a person has met before decides which schema they bring, and that schema sets their expectation.
Note
- Schemas are useful most of the time, because they let you walk into a shop you have never used and know exactly how to behave.
- Bartlett is the theorist behind reconstructive memory, and Braun, Ellis and Loftus (2002) is the study that goes with it.
- Reductionism and holism is the criticism that belongs with this theory, while free will and determinism belongs with situational factors.
How schemas and expectation change recall
- A schema steers what a person notices at the time, so a detail it treats as unimportant may never be taken in.
- At recall, when part of the memory is missing, the schema supplies the detail it expects.
- The person can recall something that was never there, and recall it with real confidence.
- Details that clashed with the schema can be dropped, because they never fitted the expected pattern.
Example
- You visit a friend's new flat once, and your kitchen schema expects a kettle on the worktop.
- A month later you picture the kettle clearly, even though they only own a coffee machine.
- The expectation supplied that detail.
Storing fragments and rebuilding the event
- A complete copy of an event is never stored, only scattered fragments of it.
- At recall those fragments are joined back into a single whole.
- Joining them draws on the person's schemas and on effort after meaning.
- Those two fill the missing pieces with what the schema expects, so the rebuilt memory drifts from the real event.
Common Mistake
- Memory is not a perfect recording that gradually fades, because it is rebuilt from fragments every time it is recalled.
- A confident, detailed memory is not necessarily an accurate one, because a schema can make an invented detail feel just as vivid.
- Bartlett is the theorist behind this theory, not Loftus.
Turning this into marks
- Name the schema the person is drawing on, such as a kitchen schema or a classroom schema, because a general statement that memory is unreliable does not secure the knowledge mark.
- Say what the person's experience of that situation has taught them to expect.
- Finish on the detail the expectation added, or the clashing detail it removed, because a schema named without that change gains no application mark.
- The mark most often lost is giving only half of the theory, so include both the schema built from experience and the expectation it creates.
Self review
- What does it mean to say that memory is reconstructive?
- What is effort after meaning?
- What is a schema, and how does one form?
- How can a schema make you recall a detail that was never there?
- Give one everyday example of expectation changing what you remember.
