The Reliability of Memory. Theories of Freud, Bartlett and Loftus.

by downtherabbithole (student)

MEMORY RELIABILITY

Memory is a mental process that allows humans to store information so that information is not lost but remains preserved and can be present to be remembered, it also enables us to learn and makes possible for humanity to move forward. Our entire civilization has been constructed upon memory, but how reliable memory really is? Before psychology ever existed and psychologists began trying to understand the mysteries no person had questioned the possibility of its errors.

Freud was a pioneer in studying affectations in memory; he was particularly interested in analyzing the reasons that cause some things to be forgotten. He proposed the theory that those memories were repressed and trapped in the subconscious because of the negative effect they would have on the awaken mind. After several studies he came to realize yet another fault of memory, he discovered that some techniques used to retrieve those memories can create false memories instead, this was named the False Memory Syndrome and it gave one of the most important insights on the possibility the memory is not entirely perfect.

Two other researchers tried experiments on memory. The fist, Frederic Bartlett argued that memory is reconstructive and that previous knowledge influences what is recalled. He conducted an experiment based on serial reproduction in which he presented a Native American story for a student population. The participants repeated the story and then the repletion of the story and so on. The final result showed that the story became shorter with each repetition, it remained coherent and it became more conventional retaining details common in the lives of the participants. The results showed that memory is not completely accurate since it ...