Reconstructive Memory

Question 1

What is reconstructive memory?

Answer 1

An explanation of how fragments of stored information are reassembled during recall, and the gaps are filled in by our expectations and beliefs to produce a coherent narrative

Question 2

What is a leading question?

Answer 2

One of the forms that post-event information can take. Misleading questions suggest information that is not entirely consistent with what actually happened.

Question 3

What are the 2 types of information in the reconstructive memory theory?

Answer 3

Information obtained during the perception of the event and external post-event information.

Question 4

What happens over time to the 2 types of information in the reconstructive memory theory?

Answer 4

The 2 sources can get integrated to until we are unable to tell them apart

Question 5

What is the name of the study for Reconstructive Memory SAQ?

Answer 5

Loftus & Pickrell

Question 6

When was the study Loftus & Pickrell made?

Answer 6

1995

Question 7

What was the sample of participants?

Answer 7

3 male

21 females

Question 8

What was the aim of the Loftus & Pickrell (1995) study?

Answer 8

To determine if false memories of autobiographical events can be created through the power of suggestion.

Question 9

What is another name of the Loftus & Pickrell (1995) study?

Answer 9

Lost at the mall

Question 10

What happened before the Loftus & Pickrell (1995) study?

Answer 10

A parent or sibling of the participant was contacted and asked two question.

Could you retell three childhood memories of the participant?

Do you remember a time when the participant was lost in a mall?

Question 11

What were the participants asked to do in the questionnaire in the Loftus & Pickrell (1995) study?

Answer 11

They were asked to write about 4 memories.

3 were real and 1 was being lost at the mall.

Question 12

What could the participants do if they didn’t remember a memory in the Loftus & Pickrell (1995) study?

Answer 12

Write ‘I do not remember this’

Question 13

What happened after the questionnaire in the Loftus & Pickrell (1995) study?

Answer 13

Participants were interviewed twice over a period of 4 weeks and were asked to recall as much information as they could.

They were then asked to rate their level of confidence about the memories on a scale of 1-10.

Question 14

What are the results of the Loftus & Pickrell (1995) study?

Answer 14

25% of the participants recalled the false memory.

However they ranked the memory as less confident than the other memories and they wrote less about the memory on their questionnaire.

Question 15

What did Bartlett show?

Answer 15

Cultural schemas allow us to
reconstruct remembered stories and events out of our own past experiences.

What is more, although we
may have shared those experiences with friends and family, it only takes the action of asking two siblings
to remember the same event from their childhood to make us realise that we reconstruct them differently
from each other.

Each of us has a unique experience of an event and a personal way of recollecting it
through our own schemas.

Question 16

Eyewitness testimony

Answer 16

This reconstructive nature of memory is important for our day-to-day living, but it is even more important
when it comes to questions of eyewitness testimony.

The California Innocence Project was formed in
1999, and was the first of Innocence Projects worldwide.

One of the main issues on which their lawyers
focus is that of eyewitness misidentification of suspects.

Once eyewitness convictions began to be
overturned by DNA evidence, the realisation developed that as many as 1 in 4 stranger identifications by
eyewitnesses could be wrong and that eyewitness misidentification played a role in more than 70% of the
convictions that were later overturned by DNA testing in the USA (California Innocence Project, 2017).