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One night two young men from Egulac went down to the river to hunt seals and while they were there it became foggy and calm. Then they heard war-cries, and they thought: "Maybe this is a war-party". They escaped to the shore, and hid behind a log. Now canoes came up, and they heard the noise of paddles, and saw one canoe coming up to them. There were five men in the canoe, and they said:

"What do you think? We wish to take you along. We are going up the river to make war on the people."

One of the young men said,"I have no arrows."

"Arrows are in the canoe," they said.

"I will not go along. I might be killed. My relatives do not know where I have gone. But you," he said, turning to the other, "may go with them."

So one of the young men went, but the other returned home.

And the warriors went on up the river to a town on the other side of Kalama. The people came down to the water and they began to fight, and many were killed. But presently the young man heard one of the warriors say, "Quick, let us go home: that Indian has been hit." Now he thought: "Oh, they are ghosts." He did not feel sick, but they said he had been shot.

So the canoes went back to Egulac and the young man went ashore to his house and made a fire. And he told everybody and said: "Behold I accompanied the ghosts, and we went to fight. Many of our fellows were killed, and many of those who attacked us were killed. They said I was hit, and I did not feel sick."

He told it all, and then he became quiet. When the sun rose he fell down. Something black came out of his mouth. His face became contorted. The people jumped up and cried.

He was dead.

Reconstructive memory- Bartlett (1932)

The war of the ghosts original story

evaluation of the Reconstructive Memory theory

Bartlett (1932) war of the ghosts study

Strengths:

  • widely accepted (face validity)
  • wealth of evidence to show that we both interpret new information and reconstruct past information in light of our schemas
  • Further support comes from the fact that memory does not appear to be distorted when we have a new experience. This is because there are no existing schemas which may distort the memory.
  • research possesses high ecological validity as schemas play a role in everyday life
  • bartletts research is important because it provides some of the first evidence that what we remember is dependent on our prior knowledge
  • bartletts work has been very infuencial in explaining the limitations of eye witness testimony

Weaknesses:

  • primarily concerned with the retrieval of information and tells us little about how memories are stored

AIM: To investigate the effects of schemas on participants recall. To investigate whether memory involves an active reconstruction at the time of recall.

SAMPLE: 20 English participants

PROCEDURE: Participants were presented with a story called "the war of the ghosts". This stimulus was chosen because it was from a different culture (North American Indian) and would conflict with prior knowledge contained in the participants schema. Participants where asked to reproduce the story. The time between the initial hearing of the story and reproduction varied from days, to weeks, to months.

participants's story reproductions were analysed to assess any distortions that had been produced.

Description

CONTINUED..

FINDINGS: Bartlett found considerable distortions in participants reproductions.

The distortions increased over successive recalls and most of these reflected the participants attempts to make the story more like one from their own culture.

This theory was proposed by Bartlett in 1932.

The reconstructive memory apporoach is concerned with what happens when informtion is stored and retrieved from memory.

CONCLUSIONS: Bartlett concluded that the accuracy of memory is low. The changes made to the story upon recall showed that the participants were actively reconstructing the story to fit their existing schema.

He believed that schemas affect retrieval rather than encoding or storage.

He also concluded that memory is forever being reconstructed as successive reproduction showed more changes.

Bartlett suggested that memory was an "imaginative reconstruction of past events; influenced by out attitudes and our responses to that event at the time they occured."

schemas

Retrieval of memories involves an active process of reconstruction. Whenever we try to recall an event actively piece it together using a range of information.

By doing so, we tend to distort out first hand memories with information not true to the event. Bartlett proposed that the reasons for these distortions was the fact that remembering involves looking at units of memory known as schemas. We have a schema for every aspect of the world, consisting of all the information we have that is related to it.

Memory is like a filing cabinet containing millions of files (schemas). These include stereotypes and cultures. When we reconstruct a memory we pull out one of these files and use the information inside to build a memory. We can pull out as many files and combine information from them.

culture

known facts

stereotypes

MEMORY

Image by Tom Mooring

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