Class Demonstration: Memory is often a reconstruction

Mr. Anthony asked us to remember several visual stimuli that were present for a few seconds each. Later, He handed out a piece of paper filled with words to each of us, and asked us to draw all the stimuli that we remembered onto the paper.

And here’s the catch, the paper that we receive contains different words, and that the purpose of this experiment was to show that we reconstruct the images we saw from the “cues” that were given.

The result was that people who received different cues reconstruct the images different from the real image. In other words, they then to draw pictures that are similar to the images of the cues more then what they remember. Though the result of the class did not appear to be quite the same with the actual results, some of the recollections made by the class are slightly different from the stimuli presented.