Long-term Memory

Narrative and Autobiographical Memory
• Do laboratory studies apply to real life memories?
– Bartlett (1932) thought narrative memory is often
reconstructed based on schemas
• Schema: general knowledge or expectation distilled from past
experiences (i.e., the ‘gist’ of things)
– e.g., the ‘eating lunch’ schema
• constructivist view of LTM
• serial reproduction: repeated recall the same story
– Native American story, “War of the Ghosts”, became more distorted
and westernized with each reproduction
– Consistency bias
• Memories are made to be consistent with current self-schema
– Source monitoring errors
• Attributing a memory from source A to source B
– Reality monitoring errors
• Thinking something happened that was just imagined or
planed