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        From conducting the experiment on reconstructive memory I have found that in condition 1 participants recalled their sentences more accurately than participants in condition 2. The reason for these findings is that in condition 1 participants were asked to recall the short story immediately after reading it, therefore the story was still clear in their memory, and therefore there was less reconstruction of their story. Whereas in condition 2 participants were asked to recall the story 24 hours later; on this condition participants did not know that they were going to have to remember the story in great detail, so when recalled most participants remembered very little, as the story wasn’t stored in their memory.

        The experimental hypothesis for thus experiment was that participants in condition 1 would recall more accurately than participants in condition 2. The results for this experiment supports the experimental hypothesis, this hypothesis was supported by the measures of central tendency from the results, as the mean for condition 1 was 4.5 whereas in condition 2 the mean was 1.5 therefore in condition 1 the results showed that participants remembered the story more accurately than condition 2. Also the mode for each conditions support the hypothesis; as for condition 2 the mode was 0 and in condition 1 a bi modal mode was found which was 3 and 5, this shows that the most sentences remembered were 3 and 5 and this therefore shows that participants in condition 1 did a lot better at recall than condition 2. A statistical test called the Mann-Whitney U test was carried out to find out whether the null hypothesis could be rejected. The results from the test show that the lowest observed value of U was 9.5 and the critical value for this test was 34, because the observed value was lower than the critical value it allows me to accept the experimental hypothesis for this research so I can say that all my results are correct.

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        In relation to my research that I have obtained Bartlett in 1932 did a similar experiment into reconstructive memory also by using a short story as the stimulus. From Bartlett’s results he found that the recalled story was distorted in many ways and that participants retold the story using different language, changes in order, omissions, and alterations in importance. In comparison to my story we both found similar results as participants did change the wording of the story, but my findings are more numerical which therefore enabled me to compare my data to get a more detailed results. Also the ...

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