错误记忆外文翻译

Construction memory and the physiological mechanism

REMEMBERING AS A RECONSTRUCTIVE PROCESS

Let’s turn now to another important way in which you use memory structures. In many cases, when you are asked to remember a piece of information, you can’t rememb er the information directly. Instead, you reconstruct the information based on more general types of stored knowledge. To experience reconstructive memory,consider this trio of questions:

• Did Chapter 3 have the word the in it?

• Did 1991 contain the day July 7?

• Did you breathe yesterday between 2:05 and 2:10 P.M.?

You probably were willing to answer “Yes!” to each of these questions without much hesitation, but you almost certainly don’t have specific, episodic memoriesto help you (unless, of course, something happened to fix these events in memory—perhaps July 7 is your birthday or you crossed out all the the’s in Chapter 3 to curb your boredom).

To answer these questions, you must use more general memories to reconstruct what islikel y to have happened. Let’s examine this process of reconstruction in a bit more detail.

THE ACCURACY OF RECONSTRUCTIVE MEMORY

If people reconstruct some memories, rather than recovering a specific memory representation for what happened, then you might expect that you could find occasions on which the reconstructed memory differed from the real occurrence—distortions. One of the most impressive demonstrations of memory distortions is also the oldest. In his classic book Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology (1932), Sir Frederic Bartlett undertook a program of research to demonstrate how individuals’ prior knowledge influenced the way they remembered new information. Bartlett studied the way British undergraduates remembered stories whose themes and wording were taken from another culture. His most famous story was “The War of the Ghosts,” an American Indian tale.

Bartlett found that his readers’ reproductions of the story were often greatly altered

from the original. The distortions Bartlett found involved three kinds of reconstructive processes:

•Leveling—simplifying the story.

•Sharpening—highlighting and overemphasizing

certain details.

•Assimilating—changing the details to better fit the participant’s own background or knowledge.

Thus, readers reproduced the story with words familiar in their culture taking the place of those unfamiliar: Boat might replace canoe and go fishing might replace hunt seals. Bartlett’s participants also often changed the story’s plot to eliminate reference s to supernatural forces that were unfamiliar in their culture.

Following Bartlett’s lead, contemporary researchers have demonstrated a variety of memory distortions that occur when people use constructive processes to reproduce memories (Bergman & Roediger, 1999). For example, one team of researchers produced what they calleda “soap opera” effect in story recall (Owens et al.,1979). Here’s an example of an episode from one of their stories:

“Nancy arrived at the cocktail party. She looked around the room to see who was there. She went to talk to her professor. She felt she had to talk to him but was a little nervous about just what to say. A group of people started to play charades. Nancy went over and had some refreshments. The hors d’oeuvres were good but she wasn’t interested in talking to the rest of the people at the party. After a while, she decided she’d had enough and left the party.”

Imagine how different it would have been to read that excerpt if you had been among the half of the participants who read this extra introduction to the story: “Nancy woke up feeling sick again and she wondered if she really were pregnant. Howwould she tell the professor she had been seeing? And the money was another problem.”

You might go back now and reread the story excerpt. For the original participants, the presence or absence of the introduction had a dramatic effect on memory performance. When asked to recall the story or to recognize statements from it, readers who had read the extra introductory material—and, thereby, called to mind a schema for an “unwanted