ABSTRACT
One trademark of the science of social cognition is undoubtedly that it construes the person as an active processor of information. This perspective has its roots in Bartlett's (1932) work on memory. Speci-®cally, Bartlett showed that the process of recalling past events includes constructions and inferences that `` go beyond the information given'' (Bruner, 1957a). In one of his experiments, participants who were asked to report the content of a fairy tale they had read previously did not rely solely on the encoded information. Instead, their reports were `` enriched'' by general knowledge that was suitable for ®lling the gaps. Thus, the task of remembering was not solved simply through the activation of memory contents, but through an active reconstruction of the past that involved `` schemata'' and inferences.
