My Recall of "War of Ghosts"

When I compared my immediate recall with the original story, there are certain things worth noticing. Due to the limited space in my immediate (working) memory (Ashcraft, 1989), I tended to capture only the main story line: a fight and death story. I omitted lots of the details, such as the description of the weather of “foggy and calm”; the conversation between five men from the canoe and the two young men; the “arrows”; the description of the ghost scenes and so on. Furthermore, I distorted some details of the original story, for example, I changed the “river” into the “sea”. I also made inferences to make my immediate recall to be more reasonable: “The ‘bold’ young man joined the people coming from the canoe to fight a war” and “This man seemed to have been killed”. Generally speaking I concentrated on the logical fight and death storyline by omitting the description of the ghosts. This seemed to be in line with Bartlett (1932)’s arguments that where the elements of the story failed to fit into readers’ schemata, these elements were omitted or transformed into more familiar forms during recollection of the story.

In terms of my recall of the original story four weeks after, I notice that the recall became shorter than the immediate recall. The certain things that were omitted in my immediate recall were also omitted this time. The distortion mentioned above was also shown. However, this time I seemed to reconstruct the story instead of only recalling the original story by writing down the following: “The man who went back home because of fear had a bad dream about the fight. He dreamed about some black smoke.” This was a distortion of the original storyline and a complete construction of myself. I added this to the story to make it non-supernatural. This is also consistent with Bartlett (1932)’s assumption that as time goes by, readers of this Indian story would add elements to it to make it less odd and more reasonable.

When I look into my recall of the original story seven weeks later, I notice that it is very similar to my recall of four weeks later. One thing worth noticing is that this time I mysteriously changed the “sea” back to the original description of the “river”. This time I also relied on my construction to recall the story by mentioning about the black smoke in one man’s dream instead of recalling the ghosts. I believe if I were given to chance to do the recall of this Indian story again some time later, I would probably stick to my reconstruction version (week 4 recall) of the original story.  

In general, I have noticed that although I omitted, distorted the information from the original story in my recalling process, such as the description of weather, place, conversation, weapon, ghost scenes, etc, I followed the basic sequence of the events in my recall. I added elements to my reconstruction of the story to make it more conventional, so the general outline of my recalls stays constant. Bartlett (1932) proposed that 'schema', an active organization of past reactions, or of past experiences, would influence our reactions and experiences, so this may explain why I tend to reconstruct the original story according to my non-supernatural thinking of a fight and death story in the recalling process. This was why my brain failed to process the illogical details of the man’s not feeling sick after being hit and the relevant description of ghost.