ABSTRACT
Professor Spiro has presented a most interesting contribution, which revitalizes people's interest in a theory which one critic has dismissed as "never very plausible and best forgotten". Barlett's research has been criticized primarily on two grounds. The first is that the considerable inaccuracy in recall over extended time periods that he reported has not been replicated in most subsequent studies. The second criticism derives from studies, which have suggested that the inaccuracies which Bartlett reported could have been "guesses" made by his subjects to fill in gaps in memory. Three conceptually distinct theories have emerged from the efforts of psychologists to account for the remembering process. The first, and certainly the oldest, is one that Neisser has labeled the "reappearance hypothesis". The second theory, commonly referred to as constructive theory, again involves the idea that remembering involves finding and bringing to consciousness stored records of past events. Reconstructive theory is third theory and it differs markedly from the previous two.
