Is memory ever perfect? In order to answer this question, several psychologists have investigated human memory and revealed that memory is highly reconstructive and not perfect. A study conducted by Bartlett aimed to investigate whether people’s memory is affected by previous knowledge and the extent to which memory is reconstructive uncovered that our memory is not fully correct and it’s reconstructive to make informations more understandable and efficient for us. Thus, Bartlett presented schema theory, one of the theories of knowledge organization that claims that new encounters with the world are rarely new. Barlett’s discovery of schema theory has been hugely influential and powerful to cognitive psychology as the theory contributed to several
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He asked the participants to listen to an unfamiliar Native American story “The War of the Ghosts” and reproduce the story after a short period of time. Serial reproduction and repeated reproduction were used. As the participants reproduced the story, it became increasingly shorter although they roughly remembered the main idea of the story. The experiment successfully showed an essential concept of human memory, that human’s memory is reliable only to some extent and largely flexible.
Because Bartlett’s study contained errors in terms of ecological validity, memory distortion of the participants, and consent form, Gauld and Stephenson (1967) claimed more accurate reproduction in a better controlled situation and therefore extended Bartlett’s study. Around half of the errors from Bartlett’s experiment were eliminated, but many errors had remained. Eysenck and Keane (2010) stated that a concept and theory confirmed by Bartlett’s study has been largely influential to the whole area of cognitive psychology although the experiment was conducted not strictly as
He asked the participants to listen to an unfamiliar Native American story “The War of the Ghosts” and reproduce the story after a short period of time. Serial reproduction and repeated reproduction were used. As the participants reproduced the story, it became increasingly shorter although they roughly remembered the main idea of the story. The experiment successfully showed an essential concept of human memory, that human’s memory is reliable only to some extent and largely flexible.
Because Bartlett’s study contained errors in terms of ecological validity, memory distortion of the participants, and consent form, Gauld and Stephenson (1967) claimed more accurate reproduction in a better controlled situation and therefore extended Bartlett’s study. Around half of the errors from Bartlett’s experiment were eliminated, but many errors had remained. Eysenck and Keane (2010) stated that a concept and theory confirmed by Bartlett’s study has been largely influential to the whole area of cognitive psychology although the experiment was conducted not strictly as