European view in the 1800s (Ebbinghaus notwithstanding). Sigmund Freud
also held to a constructionist approach, writing frequently of how people falsify
and remodel their past experiences in the course of trying to recollect them
(Freud, 1900/1953; see Erdelyi, 1990). The constructionist approach to memory
was introduced to Anglo-American psychology by Frederic Charles Bartlett in
his 1932 bookRemembering. Bartlett was also one of the first to establish a re-
search program investigating the experimental implications of constructionism.
Bartlett’s ideas about memory are illustrated in his most famous memory
experiments, in which he presented his English subjects an English translation
of a Native American folk story called ‘‘The War of the Ghosts.’’ The subjects
were required to recall the story in as much detail as possible at various time
intervals after the story was originally presented to them. The story and one
subject’s recollection of it are presented in figure 14.2.
‘‘The War of the Ghosts’’ seems odd to people raised in Western cultures. It
includes unfamiliar names, it seems to be missing some critical transitions, and
it is based on a ghost cosmology not shared by educated Western people. Bar-
tlett found that his subjects ’recollections of the story were incomplete and
often distorted. The subjects had trouble remembering the unusual proper
names, they invented plausible transitions and, most important, they altered
the facts about the ghosts. In fact, many subjects failed to remember anything at
all about ghosts. Bartlett claimed that the subjects used their Western cultural
knowledge of the nature of stories and other pertinent information to imagi-
natively reconstruct the story. When relevant cultural knowledge was missing
or inappropriate to understanding a story from another culture, the Western
subjects ’memories were transformed to make their recollections more consis-
tent with their own cultural knowledge. Bartlett’s (1932) experiments on mem-
ory led him to conclude that remembering is a form ofreconstructionin which
various sources of knowledge are used to infer past experiences.
Another historically influential event in the development of the construc-
tionist tradition was the publication of Ulric Neisser’sCognitive Psychology
in 1967. In this book Neisser discussed his opposition to the idea that past
experiences are somehow preserved and later reactivated when remembered.
Instead, Neisser claimed that remembering is like problem solving, a matter of
taking existing knowledge and memories of previous reconstructions to create
a plausible rendition of some particular past event. Neisser used the analogy of
reconstructing a complete dinosaur skeleton from a few bone fragments and
knowledge of anatomy. He suggested that ‘‘executive routines’’ guide the pro-
cess of gathering and interpreting evidence upon which a reconstruction of the
past is based. Neisser thought that executive routines were strategies acquired
through experience.
Another source of inspiration for a constructionist approach to memory
comes from research on the neurophysiology of memory and cognition (see
Squire, 1987; Carlson, 1994). Such research has revealed that there is no single
place in the brain where past experiences are stored. That is, there does not
seem to be anything that corresponds to a storage bin in the brain. Instead,
memory reflects changes to neurons involved in perception, language, feeling,
movement, and so on. Because each new experience results in altering the
strengths of connections among neurons, the brain is constantly ‘‘tuning’’ itself
316 R. Kim Guenther