Constructing Memory

Constructivist approach describes memory as the combined influences of the world and the person’s own ideas and expectations.

Elaboration may take place during both encoding and retrieval. And it need not be an exact reproduction.

For example, the experience of each person while they are watching a film will be somewhat different because they are different individual. Drawing upon different personal pasts, and with different values, thoughts, goals, feeling , expectations, moods and past experiences.

Human memories are seldom precise representations or reliable replicas of past events Sometimes, they recall less than previously experienced because of some source of forgetting. At other times, however, memory may include even more information than human originally experienced when these memories first were formed.

But some times it might be associated with enhanced sensitivity for ‘false positives’, memory constructions that include new association that were not present in the original situation, as in false memories.

What ever it means, in general constructive memory is the utilization of one’s general knowledge to provide a more complete and detailed description of some remembered event or situation.
Constructing Memory