Bartlett - 1932 (Reconstructive Memory)

Bartlett - 1932 (Reconstructive Memory)

1. NAMRC

   • Aim - To see if events are altered in people's memories to fit in with their previous experiences
   • Method - Bartlett played Chinese whispers with his students. The story was about native Americans travelling in canoes at night to fight other groups with bows and arrows. After the battle, it turned out that some of the enemy were ghosts
   • Results - By the time everyone had heard the story, it had changed. Bartlett found that stories about things outside of the normal experiences of students that changed the most. The students tended to change the story to fit in with their own experiences. The students were from a western culture when they were re-told the story, and so they changed the story to fit in with their culture. The canoes, bows and arrows were changed to guns and cars
   • Conclusion - Bartlett concluded that the participants' memories changed the story's events to fit in with their own experiences, hopes, fears etc. This supports the idea that each individual has a schema that encodes information in a certain way so that we can understand it.
   • Extra Factors - Bartlett also asked the participants to re-tell the story after varied lengths of time (20 hours, 30 months, 6 years etc) and also found that time delays change in memories too

2. Strength - the study provides evidence and support for the idea that each person changes information based on previous experiences, and the ways that we encode information

3. Weakness - the participants could be intentionally changing the story as a demand characteristic, meaning that it is not possible to measure the factors affecting memory change

4. Schemas are capable of distorting unfamiliar or unconsciously "unacceptable" information in order to "fit in" with out existing knowledge

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