Wynn & Logie (1998) - Evaluation of Bartlett

Question 1

Wynn & Logie discuss?

Answer 1

Bartlett’s ‘War of the Ghosts’ study.

Question 2

Despite the story being reduced in the recallings, there was still…

Answer 2

… a lot of detail given.

Question 3

What did participants’ reconstruction of the story show?

Answer 3

• rationalising
• importation
• invention

Question 4

Recall wasn’t an accurate reproduction of the story.

Conclusion?

Answer 4

Memory isn’t photographic; it is reconstructed.

Question 5

Recalls for different participants weren’t at regular intervals or even at the same interval for each participant. They were instead done on an opportunity bias.
Conclusion?

Answer 5

The study lacked controls.

Question 6

Wynn & Logie’s summary of Bartlett’s findings?

Answer 6

• omission of details (esp detail that wasn’t fully understood)
• rationalisation (to make the story more logical)
• transformation of order (putting the story in a different order)

Question 7

The main gist of the story was…

Answer 7

… preserved.

Question 8

Why did Wynn & Logie want to test Bartlett’s findings?

Answer 8

Because they thought that having a story that had little meaning for the participants might have affected the findings.

Question 9

What was the aim of their study?

Answer 9

To look at Bartlett’s findings & his method of repeated recall but this time using a real-life situation.

Question 10

What event was used?

Answer 10

First year psychology students recalling places & events that they came across in their first week at university.

Question 11

Why is this experiment more like what would happen in real-life recall?

Answer 11

Because participants didn’t know that they’d be asked what happened in their first week at uni.

Question 12

What did Wynn & Logie feel about their study?

Answer 12

That it had the control & structure of an experiment, but without the criticisms about validity of the task.

Question 13

What were participants given, for all the recallings?

Answer 13

Sheets with instructions & response sheets.

Question 14

How many participants received the sheet for the first recall, and how many returned the response sheets?

Answer 14

200 received, and 128 returned.

Question 15

How many participants went on with the study?

Answer 15

63, 40 females & 23 males

Question 16

Average age of participants?

Answer 16

18

Question 17

How were participants asked to attend the recalls?

Answer 17

Using a noticeboard.

Question 18

The aim was to look at…

Answer 18

… how the delays in recall affected what was described.

Question 19

Recalls at 2, 4 & 6 months were always compared with?

Answer 19

The initial recall at 2 weeks.

Question 20

3-recall group & 4-recall group showed…

Answer 20

… a significant difference in words recalled (p ≤ 0.05) over time.

Question 21

Even though within each group there didn’t seem to be significant differences in words used…

Answer 21

… there were significant differences between the groups.

Question 22

What was concluded?

Answer 22

That there were small but significant differences between the 3 groups in the number of words used when compared to the first recall.

Question 23

There didn’t seem to be differences in…

Answer 23

… the types of words that were used by different participants in the different recallings.

Question 24

There seemed to be a decrease in…

Answer 24

… the proportion of objects & adjectives recalled at the 6-month recall.

Question 25

Wynn & Logie concluded that over a period of 6 months, there is…

Answer 25

… little reduction in the amount of information that there is to be recalled.

Question 26

What was an issue with Wynn & Logie’s study?

Answer 26

They couldn’t easily measure omission of detail, as they didn’t start with the same details. This made comparison with Bartlett’s findings difficult.

Question 27

Differences between this study & Bartlett’s were put down to the fact that…

Answer 27

… although students were new to the events and locations in their first week, they were not new to the schemas and experiences.

Question 28

What was concluded about reproduction?

Answer 28

In real life there is less reproduction in memory than proposed by Bartlett in 1932.

Question 29

People’s memories for distinctive events are…

Answer 29

… resistant to change over time, no matter how many times the memory is recalled.