Reconstruction and post-event information

1. At recall you rebuild the event from the fragments you have kept.
2. You fill the gaps using schemas, the expectations you have built up from previous experience.
3. Because the rebuild happens fresh every time, the memory stays open to change long after the event is over.
4. Anything you pick up afterwards, called post-event information, can be woven into the memory the next time you rebuild it.
5. The altered memory feels entirely trustworthy, so the change goes unnoticed.
6. Each retelling then rebuilds from the altered version, so the change hardens.

Confabulation

1. Confabulation is reporting a memory confidently and inaccurately, filling a gap with detail that was never there.
2. It is sometimes called honest lying, because you believe what you are saying and have no intention to deceive.
3. It happens because you hold the event only in fragments and still have to produce a complete, sensible account of it.
4. Damage or disease affecting the brain can cause it, and so can misleading post-event information, a leading question, or a schema supplying the missing piece.
5. Healthy people confabulate too, so it matters in an ordinary police interview.

Distortion and leading questions

1. Distortion is the changing of details that were genuinely there, so the memory no longer matches what happened.
2. A leading question is worded so that it points you towards one particular answer, and that wording smuggles new information which you blend into the memory as you answer.
3. In an eyewitness interview the interviewer's choice of a single word can reshape the witness's whole account.
4. The change then sticks, because the next time the witness recalls the event she rebuilds it from the version that already contains the suggested detail.

Braun, Ellis and Loftus (2002)

1. The study behind this theory is Braun, Ellis and Loftus (2002), two laboratory experiments on how advertising can change your memory of your own past.
2. In the first experiment, 107 American undergraduates rated how likely it was that they had met and shaken hands with a favourite television character at a theme resort.
3. Two weeks later they saw either an autobiographical Disney advert or a control advert, pictured themselves in it, then rated the childhood question again.
4. Of those who saw the Disney advert, 90% raised their confidence that the handshake had happened to them, against 47% in the control condition.
5. The second experiment used 167 undergraduates and an advert about shaking hands with Bugs Bunny, a Warner Brothers character who could never have been at a Disney resort.
6. Even for that impossible event, 78% became more confident it had happened to them, against 62% for the factual control advert.
7. A strength: the findings apply to unreliable eyewitness testimony and to autobiographical advertising.

Criticisms: reductionism

1. This theory is criticised through the reductionism and holism debate.
2. Reductionism explains behaviour by breaking it down into its simplest parts, such as one process or one brain structure.
3. Reconstructive memory reduces inaccurate recall to a single process, reconstruction from schemas.
4. Saying a witness was wrong because she rebuilt the scene from her schema names one process only.
5. It leaves out how anxious she was, her age, how long and how clearly she saw the event, how far away she was, whether anything blocked her view, and how long ago it happened.
6. Those are the ADVOKATE factors the police use to judge how reliable a witness is, and not one of them is part of the theory.

Holism

1. Holism explains behaviour by looking at the whole person or whole system working together.
2. A holistic account of recall would set reconstruction alongside the witness's anxiety, her age, the viewing conditions and the time since the event.
3. Reconstructive memory is already partly holistic, because it explains recall through the person's own experience and expectation, which makes it less reductionist than explaining a memory failure by damage to the hippocampus.
4. Neither level is straightforwardly right, because reductionism buys precision and testability while holism buys completeness.
5. Weighing the two up, the theory explains confabulation and distortion well, even though reconstruction is only part of why recall goes wrong.

Turning this into marks

1. When confabulation and distortion are both asked for, make them genuinely separate, so one invents a missing detail and the other alters a detail that was there.
2. Name Braun, Ellis and Loftus (2002) and the Bugs Bunny condition, because a general claim that adverts can change memory does not secure the knowledge mark.
3. State the reductionism criticism by naming what the theory leaves out, such as the witness's anxiety or the viewing conditions.
4. The mark most often lost is describing confabulation as lying when there is no intention to deceive.