Constructive Memory

Since the times of Herman Ebbinghaus, the celebrated German psychologist who was a pioneer in the study of memory, psychologist have been intrigued by the fascinating study of memory. Why do we forget? How can we remember? Are questions that have been studied for many years with the hope to understand human mind a little better.

Sometimes we find ourselves struggling trying to remember past events that we thought were fresh and our mind but the truth is we can't seem to describe it as much as we wanted to. This is why we will be discussing remembering as a reconstructive process, rather than a constructive process.

According to Richard J. Gerrig and Philip G. Zimbardo, authors of Phsycology and Life, reconstructive memory is "The process of putting information together based on general types of stored knowledge in the absence of a specific memory representation." Which is basically a hypothesis of the specific thing we are trying to remember. We are presented with details about that specific event or situation and as the details are being handed to us we start remembering things about that day or that situation. It might happen that if you ask someone else for a recollection of events they might tell you something completely different and you start doubting about what you actually remembered.

The other day I asked my mom how she met my dad and she said that they met at a party. She explained how she was sitting in a table along with her sisters and my grandparents and my dad approached the table and asked to dance with my mom. When I asked my dad about it he said that he was at the party and he saw my mom dancing and having a good time and he asked her to dance. He didn't mention anything about my mom being sitting in a table with her family. When I asked them both at the same time, they started remembering things that the other clearly did not. There were obviously some discrepancies in their story. Which leads us to the theory that we do not remember things as they actually happened.

Frederick Barlett, who first came up with these idea says, "Remembering is not a completely independent function, entirely distinct from perceiving, imaging, or even from constructive thinking, but it has intimate relations with them all... One's memory of an event reflects a blend of information contained in specific traces encoded at the same time it occurred, plus inferences based on knowledge, expectations, beliefs, and attitudes derived from other sources. (Barlett, 1932). According to Barlett, "Memories are organized within the historical and cultural frameworks of the individual, and the process of remembering involves the retrieval of information which has been unknowingly altered in order that it is compatible with pre-existing knowledge."

It is believed that upon recall, which is a method of retrieval in which and individual is required to reproduce the information previously presented (Psychology and Life p. 205), humans change the narrative of their story to adjust it to their current schemata or the individual's historical and cultural framework.

To prove this, I asked my parents again how they met (they are divorced) and my mom said how she never noticed my dad at the party and how he was the one trying to get her attention. My dad said that at the party my mom was dancing in a way to attract his attention and that's why he asked her to dance, not because he thought she was captivating, like he said previously. They both omitted details that they thought of as irrelevant, and adjusted the story to their current situation.

By asking my mom and dad about how they met, a couple of years ago and by asking them again now, I tried to prove Charles Fernyhough's predicament of how memories are not only influence by the actual recollection of events but also by the emotions and beliefs a person might be feeling. Fernyhough says, "Memories are shaped by the self who is doing the remembering, and when the person's beliefs and emotions change, so does the story." (Fernyhough, 2012). We see what we want to see simply because its easier that way than to accept the truth.

Elizabeth Loftus who's a professor of psychology and law at the University of California has been studying for many years the reconstructive nature of memory. She studied how the recollection of events of eyewitness testimonies in