Reconstructive Memory

Reconstructive Memory
Author: Elizabeth F. Loftus | Rick L. Leitner | Daniel M. Bernstein |

Elizabeth F. Loftus
Source: The Gale Group
Subjectively, memory feels like a camera that faithfully records and

replays details of our past. In fact, memory is a reconstructive process
prone to systematic biases and errors—reliable at times, and unreliable at
others. Memories are a combination of new and old knowledge, personal
beliefs, and one's own and others' expectations. We blend these
ingredients in forming a past that conforms to one's haphazardly accurate
view of oneself and the world.
Reconstructing the Past
Traditionally, psychologists were interested in the temporal retention of

information. Since the early 1930s, many psychologists have shifted their
focus from the quantity of memory to its accuracy (Koriat, Goldsmith, and
Pansky, 2000). The British psychologist Frederic C. Bartlett (1932)
conducted one of the first systematic investigations of memory accuracy.
He asked subjects to read a legend about Indian hunters called "The War
of the Ghosts" and then to retell it to another subject who had not read it.
The second subject then told the story to another subject, and so on, until
ten subjects had heard it. The story involves two young Indian hunters
who meet a group of men in a canoe, who, in turn, invite the hunters to
join them in battle upriver. One young Indian accepts and the other
declines. During battle, the young Indian is wounded and realizes that the
men of the war party are ghosts. He returns home, recounts his tale, and
dies the next morning.
Bartlett found that subjects retained the overall gist of the story but that
they also revised the story, systematically omitting and modifying details.
For example, subjects omitted mystical references, such as ghosts, which
are not part of Westerners' worldview; they embellished other details. In
the original story, the second Indian declined to join the party because his
relatives would not know his whereabouts. By the tenth retelling, one
subject explained that this Indian refused because his elderly mother was
dependent on him, a revision that manifests Western concepts of a son's
responsibilities in general and perhaps that subject's family ties in
particular. Another common change was that subjects tended to add a
moral, possibly because stories in Western culture often have morals.
Bartlett concluded, "Remembering … is an imaginative reconstruction, or
construction, built out of the relation of our attitude towards a whole mass
of organized past reactions or experiences" (p. 213).
Bartlett's study exemplifies how time and retelling distort the memory of
stories. Another study conducted in the early 1930s using ambiguous
drawings showed that what we are told that we are viewing easily distorts
visual material. If people are shown two circles and a line and are told that
the picture represents either glasses or dumbbells, subjects' later
drawings of the original picture will assume the suggested appearance
(Carmichael, Hogan, and Walter, 1932).
There are many other studies that demonstrate the malleability of

memory for words, stories, and pictures. For example, Henry Roediger and
Kathleen McDermott (1995) altered a procedure originally developed by
James Deese in which people study lists of closely related words like bed,
pillow, tired, and dream. When later asked to recall studied words,
subjects frequently claim that they saw other words like sleep that were
not presented but are related to those that were. Subjects often assert
these "false memories" with a high degree of confidence and detail (e.g.,
that a male as opposed to a female voice spoke the word). There is some
debate about whether subjects generate the word sleep while studying
the word list or later, when asked to recall the entire word list. In either
case, people draw inferences—not necessarily accurate—about their
present and past experiences.
Yet another way to demonstrate memory's attempt at synthesis is to

present subjects with successive, thematically related slides depicting
common routines like going grocery shopping. One slide shows a woman
putting a box of items into her shopping cart. The next slide shows several
oranges on the ground. When subjects are asked later to recognize slides
that had previously been shown, they mistakenly say that they saw a slide
depicting the woman removing an orange from the bottom of a pile of
oranges (Hannigan and Tippens-Reinitz, 2001). They make this causal
inference because people naturally attempt to piece together the
fragments of their past in order to make memory as coherent as possible.
100 word summary: Reconstructive Memory
Reconstructive memory recalls that is hypothesized to work by
storing abstract features which are then used to construct the
memory during recall. For example, it is hard to draw a
complete picture of a penny even though it is something that
we see all the time. This observation of memory by Bartlett
says that reconstructive memory is putting the pictures of
information from a memory together, but often in the wrong
order, with bits missing or added. In fact, it becomes a
problem when it comes to the law. In criminal cases a witness
often plays an important role in providing information against
the defendant. However, the eyewitness can be inaccurate
because the memory was not reconstructed correctly.

Reconstructive Memory

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Reconstructive Memory

Author: Elizabeth F. Loftus | Rick L. Leitner | Daniel M. Bernstein |

Subjectively, memory feels like a camera that faithfully records and

Reconstructing the Past

Traditionally, psychologists were interested in the temporal retention of

There are many other studies that demonstrate the malleability of

Yet another way to demonstrate memory's attempt at synthesis is to

100 word summary: Reconstructive Memory

Reconstructive memory recalls that is hypothesized to work by

storing abstract features which are then used to construct the

memory during recall. For example, it is hard to draw a

complete picture of a penny even though it is something that

we see all the time. This observation of memory by Bartlett

says that reconstructive memory is putting the pictures of

information from a memory together, but often in the wrong

order, with bits missing or added. In fact, it becomes a

problem when it comes to the law. In criminal cases a witness

often plays an important role in providing information against

the defendant. However, the eyewitness can be inaccurate

because the memory was not reconstructed correctly.

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