three versions: the fever leaves the woman, who starts to serve the visitor(s).
The three versions of the healing of Peter’s mother-in-law (from Matt.
8:14–15; Mark 1:29–31; and Luke 4:38–39, respectively) suggest that the
same cognitive processes that resulted in the different versions of“The War
of the Ghosts”in Bartlett’s experiment can explain the relation between
different versions of the same story in the New Testament. Remember that
Bartlett’s students did not make any conscious effort to interpret the folktale
or to change anything in it. On the contrary, they were doing their best to
reproduce the text as faithfully as they could. An important lesson from
memory studies is that human cognition produces such changes automatic-
ally, exactly when people do their best to remember things faithfully. Memory
is not designed for the verbatim recall of stories, and quite different—often
surprising and innovative—versions are produced as a result. Our example
was a short and relatively simple biblical passage. Most stories in the New
Testament are longer than this episode: they are comparable with the length of
“The War of the Ghosts.”
4.4 NARRATIVE SCHEMATA: SCRIPTSNarrative scripts are mental schemata for events. According to Roger
C. Schank and Robert P. Abelson, things that happen to us are perceived
and stored in memory as chains of elementary actions (Schank & Abelson,
1977, 1995).^5 Now it turns out that most things that happen to us are similar to
episodes that we have experienced before. As an“economy measure”in the
storage of episodes, Schank and Abelson argued,“when enough of them are
alike they are remembered in terms of a standardized generalized episode
which we call ascript”(Schank & Abelson, 1977, p. 19). Like other cognitive
schemata, scripts organize memories so that they can be easily mobilized to
understand new information. In the words of Schank and Abelson, a script
functions as“a set of expectations about what will happen next in a well-
understood situation”(Schank & Abelson, 1995, p. 5). When we receive
sufficient amount of information that is related to a given script, the script is
evoked(instantiated). Once the script is instantiated, it supplies additional
information about the situation that is not directly available: scripts make clear
what is going to happen in a given situation and what acts of various participants
(^5) Script theory (like schema theory in general) was originally developed without knowledge
about the underlying neuronal mechanisms. However, more recent insights about the role of the
hippocampus in connecting distinct pieces of memory enabled Eichenbaum (2012, pp. 162–4) to
describe (hypothetically) how specialized cells represent“events”as assembles of sensory and
other information, and how events are connected into sequences.
Memory and Transmission 69