I'm looking for theoretical and empirical articles on social transactions among individuals that involve sharing information, stories, and memories, and how such sharing leads to information losses and gains - a distortion of the original message (as in the children's game "pass it along"). Recommendations or thoughts?
Yes - serial reproduction tasks as in Bartlett's War of the Ghosts - everyday transmission of information. I'm trying to accumulate research that examines different types of materials using this procedure (for example, song). I've read a lot of criticisms of Bartlett's original work (and interpretation) but I am unfamiliar with any recent work in this area and whether there is a sophisticated theory on this process (either drawing from "schema theory" or considering other influences).
Have you asked John Sutton? He'd probably know better than me (are you in the same department?). The schema stuff I know is not as recent. So much of the recent stuff is just looking at how to distort small pieces of memory in a single step.
Yes I'll definitely ask John! Am looking for general theories / models that accommodate non-linguistic cultural knowledge. Now - I am not primarily a memory researcher, but my understanding of Bartlett's task is that it did not involve different people passing along a story from one to another, such that there is a kind of evolution of the story that reflects a collective schema. Or did he? I only know the repeated reproduction - whereby the same person recounts the story repeatedly, after significant delays. I think the process may be a little different.
Hi Bill! and Dan! I'll write more later but here are a couple of recent studies which use serial reproduction, Cheers, John
Carbon, C.-C. & Albrecht, S. (2012). Bartlett's schema theory: The unreplicated
"portrait d'homme" series from 1932. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology,
65(11), 2258-2270.
Roediger H. L. III, Meade, M. L., Gallo, D. A., & Olson, K. R. (2014). Bartlett
revisited: Direct comparison of repeated reproduction and serial reproduction
techniques. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, DOI:
10.1016/j.jarmac.2014.05.004
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