Wynn & Logie (1998) - Evaluation of Bartlett Flashcards
Wynn & Logie discuss?
Bartlett’s ‘War of the Ghosts’ study.
Despite the story being reduced in the recallings, there was still…
… a lot of detail given.
What did participants’ reconstruction of the story show?
- rationalising
- importation
- invention
Recall wasn’t an accurate reproduction of the story.
Conclusion?
Memory isn’t photographic; it is reconstructed.
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?
The study lacked controls.
Wynn & Logie’s summary of Bartlett’s findings?
- 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)
The main gist of the story was…
… preserved.
Why did Wynn & Logie want to test Bartlett’s findings?
Because they thought that having a story that had little meaning for the participants might have affected the findings.
What was the aim of their study?
To look at Bartlett’s findings & his method of repeated recall but this time using a real-life situation.
What event was used?
First year psychology students recalling places & events that they came across in their first week at university.
Why is this experiment more like what would happen in real-life recall?
Because participants didn’t know that they’d be asked what happened in their first week at uni.
What did Wynn & Logie feel about their study?
That it had the control & structure of an experiment, but without the criticisms about validity of the task.
What were participants given, for all the recallings?
Sheets with instructions & response sheets.
How many participants received the sheet for the first recall, and how many returned the response sheets?
200 received, and 128 returned.
How many participants went on with the study?
63, 40 females & 23 males
Average age of participants?
18
How were participants asked to attend the recalls?
Using a noticeboard.
The aim was to look at…
… how the delays in recall affected what was described.
Recalls at 2, 4 & 6 months were always compared with?
The initial recall at 2 weeks.
3-recall group & 4-recall group showed…
… a significant difference in words recalled (p ≤ 0.05) over time.
Even though within each group there didn’t seem to be significant differences in words used…
… there were significant differences between the groups.
What was concluded?
That there were small but significant differences between the 3 groups in the number of words used when compared to the first recall.
There didn’t seem to be differences in…
… the types of words that were used by different participants in the different recallings.
There seemed to be a decrease in…
… the proportion of objects & adjectives recalled at the 6-month recall.
