3) Memory as an active process Flashcards
What is the aim of Bartlett’s war of the ghosts study?
Bartlett investigated how memory is reconstructed when people are asked to recall an unfamiliar story – in particular, a story from a different culture
What is the method used in Bartlett’s war of the ghosts study?
Participants were shown the War of the Ghosts story.
They recalled it after 15 minutes, then after weeks, months and years
Bartlett recorded the recall
What are the rusults of Bartlett’s war of the ghosts study?
Participants changed the story
They left out information that they were less familiar with. The story was shortened, and phrases were changed to those used in the participants’ own culture
What is the conclusion of Bartlett’s war of the ghosts study?
The study shows that we use our knowledge of social situations to reconstruct memory, as details of the story were invented to improve meaning
What is the theory of Reconstructive Memory
The War of the Ghosts study demonstrated that memory is an active process
People remember overall meaning of events and, when retrieving information, they rebuild
Why do we say that our memories are not accurate?
We do not have exact recall.
Elements are missing, and memories are not an accurate representation of what happened
What is reconstruction?
We record small pieces of information in long-term memory.
During recall we recombine them to tell the whole story
Each time, the elements are combined slightly differently
Social and cultural influences affecting reconstructive memory?
The way that information is stored and recalled is affected by social and cultural expectations, like ‘going fishing’ rather than ‘hunting seals’
What is effort after meaning?
We focus on the meaning of events and make an effort to understand the meaning to make sense of the parts of the story
What are the 3 factors affecting the accuracy of memory?
Interference: If two memories compete with each other, one memory may prevent us from accessing the other memory
Context: Other things that are present at the time of learning act as a cue for recall. This improves the accuracy of memory
False memory: A memory for something that did not happen, but a person thinks it is a true memory
