‘Memory is more a matter of reconstruction than reproduction’

To what extent has research supported the view that memories are influenced by the retrieval process?

Structure these statements to write a logical essay response to the question above. Cut out the strips and piece them together if it helps, You will need a good supply of linking phrases such as ‘However…’ and ‘This is supported by…’ and you don’t need to use all the information – YOU decide what is in and what is out.

A Classic study by Allport and Postman (1947) showed two men arguing on a train. Participants invariably remembered the open razor as being in the hand of the black man, whereas in fact it had been held by the white man.
The reconstruction principle states that remembering the past occurs in the context of the present. When we try to recover a memory, we begin with information supplied by the retrieval cue, combine this with what we can recover from the memory trace, and then fill in the gaps.
It may be that these findings don’t hold up under more naturalistic conditions. Wynn and Logie (1998) tested student’s recall of real-life events over a 6-month period. Recall was relatively accurate and little transformation took place, suggesting that there was very little use of reconstruction in real-life situations.
Bartlett found that participants remembered different parts of stories and that they interpreted them within their own frames of reference (cultural expectations), changing the facts to make them fit.
Bartlett concluded that much human memory is influenced by factors that are social in origin and that may be obscured by laboratory methods because of the artificial nature of the material used in such experiments.
This was not a very well controlled study. The participants were not given very specific instructions and therefore some of the distortions may have resulted from conscious guessing rather than gaps in memory. Gauld and Stephenson (1967) found that when accurate recall was stressed at the outset, then errors fell by almost half.
Bartlett conducted a series of experiments to demonstrate reconstructive memory. His hypothesis was that if a person is given something to remember and then asked to recall the story or picture over a period of weeks or years, the recollection will be endlessly transformed.
Other studies have shown that memory can be very accurate. For example, in situations that are personally important or distinctive we do remember considerable and accurate detail. Memory can in such instances be quite passive, for example when you are required to learn lines for a play.
Bartlett assumed that it was the retrieval process that was affected by schema, but subsequent research has shown that initial comprehensions and storage are also affected.