Sociocultural mediators of remembering: an extension of Bartlett's method of repeated reproduction

The reported research uses an extension of Bartlett's method of repeated reproduction to provide data on the sociocultural processes underlying reconstructive remembering. Twenty participants worked in pairs to remember the War of the Ghosts story 15 min and 1 week after presentation. The observed transformations were comparable to previous research with individuals. Going beyond previous research, we analyse participants' discourse to provide a window on the processes underlying these transformations. Textual excerpts demonstrate how imagery, narrative coherence, deduction, repetition, gesture, questioning and deferring contribute to the transformation and conventionalization of the material. These diverse sociocultural mediators are integrated into a partially coherent recollection by participants self-reflecting, or as Bartlett termed it, turning around upon their schemas. We demonstrate that this self-reflection is both a social and a psychological process, occurring because participants are responding to their own utterances in the same way that they respond to the utterances of other people. These empirical findings are used to make a case for using discursive data to look not only at discursive processes but also at socially situated and scaffolded psychological processes.