What makes memory constructive? A study in the serial reproduction of Bartlett’s experiments

Abstract

The claim that memory is constructive or reconstructive is no longer controversial in psychology. However, in the last decades it has generally been taken to mean that our memories are inaccurate or distorted. In the locus classicus of the constructive memory idea-Bartlett's Remembering-we find a different meaning: Constructive is there understood as a future-oriented and adaptive characteristic of remembering, which can also lead to accuracy. His notion of constructiveness was even earlier elaborated in relation to group dynamics in his book Psychology and Primitive Culture. How did we get from one meaning of constructive to another? This question is explored through a serial reproduction analysis of experiments purporting to replicate Bartlett's study. The focus is on the transformation of terminology used to describe qualitative changes introduced by subjects into reproductions. In this history a diversity of terms, coming from different intellectual sources, is gradually subsumed under the single term 'distortion'. Thus, psychologists have reconstructed Bartlett's work based on their own background, other influences and their own project for the discipline, illustrating the very constructive processes Bartlett theorized.

Documenting a contested memory: Symbols in the changing city space of Cairo

“…The serial reproduction of symbols highlighted the agency of all social actors and the dynamic social life of symbols in public sphere. In contrast to Bartlett's experiments when participants serially reproduced foreign images that they had no access to, transforming them into something familiar (Wagoner, 2017b), in the current case, transformation was not about forgetting the original symbol or making a foreign object familiar, but about social actors actively appropriating symbols to represent the past the way they make sense of it (see transformation of Figure 1 to Figure 2 then Figure 3, and Figure 4 to Figure 5).…”

Remembering and Communicating Climate Change Narratives – The Influence of World Views on Selective Recollection

“…In this study we examined processes of constructive memory (Bartlett, 1932; Wagoner, 2017) as one possible factor shaping peoples’ climate change narratives. World views, we assume, serve as cultural schemata that operate as filters when people recollect narrative information and share their narratives with others.…”

“…Recollections are not simply subject to random forgetting, but are the result of systematic modifications and alterations. The constructive aspect of memory has been explained by processes such as conventionalization, rationalization, simplification, assimilation, and distortion (Wagoner, 2017). What people typically remember is strongly influenced by the categories and schemata they utilize when interpreting their experiences.…”

Choice awareness and manipulation blindness: A cognitive semiotic exploration of choice-making

“…One of the foundations upon which modern work of cognitive psychology has been built is Bartlett's (1932) publication Remembering, which contributed with significant theoretical and experimental insights to the study of memory (Kintsh, 1995;Roediger, 2003). In fact, it was Bartlett who first initiated the notion of constructiveness, and most notably not as distortion, as it has typically been interpreted in mainstream cognitive science (Wagoner, 2017); rather, as the positive characteristic of memory that warrants us the flexibility to cope with the needs and challenges of the world we are placed in along with its wide range of continuous changes. Bartlett's (1932) conception of memory is as a functional, embodied activity, having a futureoriented social nature:…”