In 2005, two Cornell human ecology professors, Drs. Charles Brainerd and Valerie Reyna, published a book titled The Science of False Memory.* Here, they cited Sir Frederic Bartlett’s "War of the Ghosts" experiment as an example of memory fallibility. While it’s quite possible for everyone here to memorize the folktale word-for-word, the limited nature of exposure precluded this for all except those manifesting exceptional or eidetic memory.

Such research demonstrates that when recalling something with culturally and temporarily limited exposure, most people cannot recall the event (i.e., the story) verbatim. What they retain is the ‘gist memory,’ an overall understanding of the story. As Professor Bartlett found, this gist is guided by a number of psychological and sociological factors, the basic framework upon which we organize our thoughts and incoming information, an internal construct of the cosmos/ Psychologists refer to this as our ‘schema.’

"The War of the Ghost" story challenges our memories because of its unfamiliarity. It simply lies outside our schema. Drs. Brainerd and Reyna demonstrate the power of schemata to shape our memories by citing a number of studies that simultaneously show how familiarity fosters verbatim memory, and how it also distorts memory.

On a commonsense level, we might expect to forget some of the details of a story, just like we forget the minutiae of the day (unless you’re Marilu Henner or someone else with hyperthymesia). What results is a soupy kind of recall, the general remembrance of experience that lies outside any context that details might provide. As Drs. Brainerd and Reyna put it:

The core precept of constructivism is that people remember what they understand to be the meaning of their experience, not their experience per se….If people remember what they understand, it is not in the least surprising that they remember false information that preserves the gist of their experience. [emphasis original]

In one study, researchers led subjects to an office desk cluttered with all sorts of items typically found on an office desk. If they put in something incongruous to the setting (in this case a toy truck), then the anomaly was recalled without problem. However, when nothing anomalous appeared on the desk, respondents often remembered many items accurately, but then said that something typically office-like (e.g., a stapler) was on the desk when, in fact, it wasn’t.

The authors use the term ‘semantic intrusion’ to describe the above, where an object that would be a logical item on a list, is in fact not on the list. It is here where the authors begin to form definition of a false memory. After all, if you remember stapler on the desk, and the stapler isn’t there, then the memory of that stapler is false.

Likewise, when trying to recall a list of words after minimal exposure, subjects could often recall many of the items if they kinda went together. For example, the words tower, mark, melon, table, boy, cooler, logged, and loo can all logically follow the character string ‘water.’ When remembering a list like this, some (if not many or all) respondents could very well add other words to this list, such as ‘bottle’ or ‘pipe.’ If the list does not contain linkable words, or if the subject has to respond in a precise order, then he or she might be subject to primacy and recency effects. We often remember the first few items of a series, and the last few items of the series. But as one of the respondents in our "War of the Ghost" exercise wrote, we’re often "losing some of the middle here."

In The Science of False Memory, Drs. Brainerd and Reyna went on at some length to discuss the dominance of gist memory over verbatim memory, although most people can handle both. This idea constitutes one of the basis of Fuzzy-Trace Theory (FTT), a concept the two developed back in the late-1980s. Basically, FTT describes how people intertwine memory, rationality, culture and emotion in their personal assessment of risk. Because we tend, primarily, to remember the gist of things (hence the term ‘fuzzy-trace’) as opposed to details (verbatim memory), we often see risk in very broad, and sometimes irrational terms. We might say, for instance, that New York City is a dangerous place, because we not only hear about real crimes committed there, but we also see the dangers of NYC in movies and television programs shot in the Big Apple. Tourists are especially leery of getting mugged or worse. In this case, the Fuzzy Trace recall of dangerous events linked to this city elevates the assessment of risk. However, the violent crime rate in NYC is fairly low, measured in objective terms.***

So, concluded the authors, memory is fallible. They would also say that it’s malleable. Even worse, they maintained that the memories of children are especially subject to manipulation.


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*The College of Human Ecology (CHE) at Cornell University should not be confused with the CIA research front, the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, even though both were based at the same Ivy League school. The latter came about through consultation with Psychology Department professor Dr. Harold Wolff after World War II. The former, according to its official website, grew out of the College of Agriculture in 1907 as The College of Home Economics. They changed the name to CHE in 1969.

**Brainerd and Reyna published their first paper on the subject in the 1990 edition (v. 10) of Developmental Review. It’s title: "Gist is the Grist: Fuzzy-Trace Theory and the New Intuitionism."

***Albuquerque, NM; Anchorage, AK; Atlanta, GA; Bakersfield, CA; Baltimore, MD; Boston, MA; Buffalo, NY: Charlotte, NC; Cincinnati, OH; Cleveland, OH; Columbus, OH; Corpus Christi, TX; Dallas, TX; Detroit, MI; Fresno, CA: Greensboro, NC; Houston, TX; Jacksonville, FL; Kansas City, MO; Las Vegas, NV; Long Beach, CA; Louisville, KY; Memphis, TN; Miami, FL; Milwaukee, WI; Minneapolis, MN; Mobile, AL; Nashville, TN; New Orleans, LA; Newark, NJ; Oakland, CA: Oklahoma City, OK; Philadelphia, PA; Pittsburgh, PA; Sacramento, CA; San Antonio, TX; San Francisco, CA; St. Louis, MO; St. Paul, MN; Stockton, CA; Tampa, FL; Toledo, OH; Tucson, AZ; Tulsa, OK; Washington, DC and Wichita, KS ALL have violent crime rates higher than New York, NY, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, Table 6.

I should point out, though, that, for some reason, the FBI cautions against taking the rankings too seriously(?). Nevertheless, the FBI’s statistics offer one more gist to offer your schemata.