What is reconstructive memory?

Elizabeth Loftus, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

Elizabeth Loftus answers

Memory is not a recording. Every time you retrieve an experience, you are not pressing play on a stored file — you are building the event again from fragments, and the building materials include things that were never part of the original experience.1 The process starts before anything is stored. When we witness an event, we do not passively absorb it; we interpret it, draw inferences, fill in what we expect to be true.2

Those inferences get stored alongside what was actually observed, and there is no tag distinguishing one from the other. Then, between the event and the moment of recall, new information arrives — a question someone asks, a detail a friend mentions, a photograph seen in a newspaper — and fragments from that encounter get laid down too.3 When retrieval finally happens, the mind reconstructs from all of it: original observation, inference, and everything that came after, fused together.4

What this means in practice is that memory grows rather than fades. The initial perception may weaken, but every act of remembering adds to the structure.5 Misleading suggestions can change a memory entirely, and in some cases plant whole events that never happened at all — if someone you trust tells you, convincingly, that you spilled a drink at a family wedding when you were small, there is a real chance you will develop a detailed memory of an event that never occurred.6

People in such studies not only report the false event; they elaborate it with sensory detail they were never given, and they hold it with genuine confidence.7 The Penfield experiments from neurosurgery once seemed to suggest the opposite — that every experience is stored somewhere in the brain, waiting to be retrieved intact. That reading was wrong.8

We store very little of what we actually see, the fragments fade, and reconstruction fills the gaps — sometimes incorrectly.9 The thing we feel sure makes us ourselves turns out, on examination, to be treacherous: over-accommodating, fugitive, delightfully and fearfully unreliable.10

Sources

  1. every time we recall an event we must reconstruct the memory, and so each time it is changed — colored by succeeding events, increased understanding, a new context, suggestions by others, other people's recollections.
    Memory, Surprising New Insights Into How We Remember and Why We Forget, pp. 186–189
  2. The inferences are likely aspects of the situation which have not actually been observed; thus, upon realizing that an accident occurred, a person might infer that some damage was done either to the car or to the pedestrian. Fragments of this interpretation are then stored in memory.
    Eyewitness Testimony, pp. 129–131
  3. Before the security patrolman identified R. G., he saw a newspaper photo that could have supplemented his memory.
    Memory, Surprising New Insights Into How We Remember and Why We Forget, pp. 186–189
  4. Fragments were presumably stored at two different times, once at the time the event was observed and again when subsequent information about it was encountered.
    Eyewitness Testimony, pp. 129–131
  5. According to the cliché, memory fades. In fact, however, it grows. What may fade is the initial perception, the actual experience of the events.
    Memory, Surprising New Insights Into How We Remember and Why We Forget, pp. 186–189
  6. If your mother incorrectly told you that, as a young child, you had caused a scene by spilling a drink all over a relative at a wedding, there is a real chance that you could develop a memory of this made-up event.
    Memory myths (Catalyst , 23 (3), p 6-8, 2013), p. 2
  7. asking people to review old photographs or imagine childhood events can lead them to have rich, detailed filled memories for entire events that never occurred.
    Updating Ebbinghaus on the science of memory, p. 212
  8. Penfield made the mistake of thinking that this meant all experience is stored in the brain in the form in which it is to be retrieved.
    Memory myths (Catalyst , 23 (3), p 6-8, 2013), p. 2
  9. Psychology experiments have shown that we store very little of what we actually see, and these details fade with time. When we remember something, we put the memory together (reconstruct it) out of the fragments we did manage to store.
    Memory myths (Catalyst , 23 (3), p 6-8, 2013), p. 2
  10. 'The thing we feel sure makes us ourselves (no memory, no me) is also something we know to be treacherous, over-accommodating, fugitive: delightfully and fearfully unreliable.'
    Updating Ebbinghaus on the science of memory, p. 212