www hoddereducation co ukpsychologyreview Remembering Bartlett 1932 Matt

Remembering Practical applications Bartlett’s conclusion that memory is a reconstructive process has been of profound importance in understanding inaccuracies in eyewitness memory. His technique of repeated reproduction revealed that when people are asked to recall events several times their memory becomes less accurate, and his technique of serial reproduction revealed that when people report what others have told them accuracy also declines. These findings on the reconstructive nature of memory underpin modern research such as that by Elizabeth Loftus, who has shown that witness memory is a flawed source of evidence and that some memories are entirely false. Hodder & Stoughton © 2017

Remembering Reliability of procedure Replications of Bartlett’s study have been successfully carried out (e. g. Mandler & Johnson, 1977), and results are congruent with Bartlett’s. This shows that Bartlett’s procedure has a degree of external reliability. It is hard to comment on the internal reliability of Bartlett’s procedure as he did not provide any details of the environment in which the experiment took place, but we do know that the procedure was fairly standardised, with participants carrying out filler tasks for 15– 30 minutes before recall. Hodder & Stoughton © 2017

Remembering Lack of quantitative data Bartlett’s research paper includes qualitative rather than quantitative analysis, describing how memories tended to change through repeated and serial reproduction. In some types of research this is not a problem but it does limit the usefulness of an experiment. There is no indication in Bartlett’s qualitative analysis of how many participants experienced these memory distortions or how many distortions each person experienced on average. This is a problem because it leaves unanswered a fundamental question about how distorted memories were. Hodder & Stoughton © 2017

Remembering Participant details Bartlett does not provide details of his participants. This makes it hard to evaluate the generalisability of his procedure. Some aspects of the study, for example the use of folk tales like ‘The War of the Ghosts’, might lead to different findings for different cultural groups and ages. Hodder & Stoughton © 2017