Reconstruction Memory Essay

Once information about an event is encoded and stored into memory it is believed by people to be permanently stored without being altered by any other stored information prior or post the event. Research has found it to be the opposite, memories are not perfect recordings of past events but just reconstructions of those events (Roediger & DeSoto, 2015). Memory is reconstructive and can be influenced by one’s general knowledge and by post-event information. These reconstructions can either be accurate or inaccurate. This is why the Reconstruction memory phenomenon was introduced, to find out about the claim made about memory being reconstructive. Reconstructive memory is about the recollection of memories by trying to reconstruct past events
False memory may arise inferences made during an event. Applying knowledge changes what a person recalls meaning that an individual might add some details from his/her knowledge to the memory in question and when retrieving the memory they might say that those details that they have added are what really happened in an event. The fourth factor is similarity. This factor suggests that false memories occur when someone incorrectly believes that an event happened due to similarities of the two events. This shows that exposure to similar events can create confusions because people tend to confuse the original event with another event that looks or sounds like
She then investigated whether misleading questions and information might also affect one’s memory of the original event. She developed the misinformation effect which showed that eyewitnesses’ memories about an event are altered when there is exposure to incorrect information (Loftus, 1975). Misinformation effect happens when a person’s recall of memories becomes less accurate. Loftus, Miller and Burn (1978) conducted a study about the misinformation effect. In this study participants witnessed an event and after the event they read a narrative with misinformation. When tested participants remembered the misinformation as being on the actual event. This might be explained by one of the findings from the study that- cueing or misleading questions have an effect on one’s memory because people tend to use what is available in retrieving memories. People believe this cueing or misleading information and adopt it as their memory, believing it is what actually happened in the event. A number of studies on this field have shown that exposure to misleading post-event information can distort/impair the memory of that particular event (Loftus, 1975).
Activation/Monitoring framework suggests that there two sets of processes involved in the arousal of false memories (Karpicke, McCabe & Roediger, 2008). This framework “…proposes that when subjects study word lists of related