dinner event. On the other hand, your cognitive system will not consistently
strengthen the connection between the idea of an entree and the ideas that
represent any particular entree (e.g., spaghetti), because the entrees change
nightly. For instance, on the second night the connection between entree and
lamb chops will be strengthened while the previously established connection
between entree and spaghetti will weaken.
If you are later asked what you had for dinner on the first night, the strong
connections between the dinner and entree ideas, between the dinner and bev-
erage ideas, and between the beverage and iced tea ideas mean that you will
reconstruct that you had some kind of an entree and iced tea. The connections
between the idea of entree and any particular entree, such as spaghetti, will be
relatively weak; consequently you will not be able to reconstruct as reliably
which entree you had the first night. Instead, you may reconstruct only that
you had an entree. Note that these reconstructions are accomplished without
retrieving an actual record of each night’s dinner. Other facts about food con-
sumption may also influence your memory. If you are on a low-fat diet, for
example, you may use your knowledge of fat content to deduce that you did
not eat potato chips with your meal. In a later section of this chapter I will
discuss in more detail how ideas and beliefs affect recollection. Although my
example is greatly simplified, it at least illustrates how the cognitive system
extracts the invariants of dinner experiences and uses them to form a plausible
reconstruction of past dinner experiences.
Constructionist theory, then, predicts that people will not be able to remem-
ber very well the constantly changing details of events, such as the particular
Figure 14.3
Depiction of a constructionist account of memory for three dinners. The more lines that connect one
concept to another, the more likely the connections between those concepts will be remembered.
Memory 319