Avtive Process Flashcards
What was the aim of Barlett war of Ghost study
Bartlett investigated how memory is reconstructed when people are asked to recall an unfamiliar story – in particular a story from a different culture.
The participants were from his uni in the uk
What was the method of barrettes war of ghost study
Each participant was asked to read a story called ‘War of the Ghosts’, which a Native American folk tale.
• They were told to read the passage twice through to themselves, at their normal reading pace.
Then a method called serial reproduction was used which was
• About 15 minutes later, they were asked to retell the story. Then he showed the new version of the story to a different person, and so on, like a game of Chinese whispers.
• A record was made of the story that each person reported, allowing Bartlett to know what the changes were from one person to the next. (Successive recall)
None of the participants knew the purpose of the study
What is reconstructive memory
Fragments of stored info are resembled during recall. The gaps are filled in by our expectations and beliefs so that we can produce a story that makes sense
Bartlett thought that memory was not just a stored copy of facts. We change our memories to fit in with what we already know, even though we think we are remembering exactly what happened.
This is called Reconstructive Memory.
Results of Barlettes war of ghosts study
After the story was passed on 10 times:
- The passages become much shorter
- There were lots of omissions
- There were changes to the detail
- The order of events was changed.
The story had gone from 330 words to 150 words. All mention of ghosts disappeared
despite the title being emphasised by Bartlett to the first participant.
Unfamiliar names were changed into familiar ones, canoes were changed to boats, and paddling was changed to rowing.
Despite the complex nature of the story, the final version of it was a clear story of a fight and death.
What is serial reproduction
Serial reproduction is meant to duplicate the process by which stories are passed down
through generations, how gossip and rumours are spread. A bit like Chinese Whispers.
What is the conclusion for barlettes war of ghosts study
Bartlett concluded that our memory is
not an exact copy of what we hear. It is distorted by what
we already know about the world. Therefore, our memory is
influenced by our own beliefs and stereotypes
Evaluate Bartlett’s war of the ghosts study
One weakness is the study was conducted rather casually, with no set standards about where and how people recalled info.
The participants were not given any instructions at the outset about what they should do. Another study found that recall was much more accurate when participants were told from the beginning that accurate recall was important (Gauld and Stephenson 1967). However participants did still make errors
This suggests that recall is probably more accurate than Bartlett suggested.
Another weakness is that Bartlett’s own beliefs are likely to have affected the way he interpreted the data.
The conclusions depend on how you interpret results. Bartletts analysed each example of recall and had to decided what counted as accurate and what did don’t. Since he believed that recall would be affected by cultural expectations, he may have been ore likely to see this kind of effect in the results.
This means that we cannot fully trust the results of his study
One weakness is that the story was unusual and therefore may not reflect everyday memory processes
Most of the time we use memory to deal with quite everyday experiences. In such cases our memories are not affected by cultural expectations and we therefore may recall things quite accurately.
Therefore this study may tell us very little about everyday memory
