How do we use our mental images of the present to reconstruct our past? Maurice Halbwachs addressed this question for the first time in his work on collective memory, which established him as a major figure in the history of sociology. This volume, the first comprehensive English-language translation of Halbwach's writings on the social construction of memory, fills a major gap in the literature on the sociology of knowledge. Halbwachs' primary thesis is that human memory can only function within a (...) collective context. Collective memory, Halbwachs asserts, is always selective; various groups of people have different collective memories, which in turn give rise to different modes of behavior. Halbwachs shows, for example, how pilgrims to the Holy Land over the centuries evoked very different images of the events of Jesus' life; how wealthy old families in France have a memory of the past that diverges sharply from that of the nouveaux riches; and how working class construction of reality differ from those of their middle-class counterparts. With a detailed introduction by Lewis A. Coser, this translation will be an indispensable source for new research in historical sociology and cultural memory. Lewis A. Coser is Distinguished Professor of Sociology Emeritus at the State University of New York and Adjunct Professor of Sociology at Boston College. (shrink)

It is proposed that our memory is made up of individual, unconnected Records, to each of which is attached a Heading. Retrieval of a Record can only be accomplished by addressing the attached Heading, the contents of which cannot itself be retrieved. Each Heading is made up of a mixture of content in more or less literal form and context, the latter including specification of environment and of internal states (e.g. drug states and mood). This view of memory allows an (...) easy account of a number of natural memory phenomena as well as a variety of laboratory findings such as the differences between recall and recognition. The theory further proposes that Headed Records can neither be deleted nor modified. Data apparently against such a hypothesis can be accounted for in terms of the retrieval process. (shrink)

With growing concerns over children's suggestibility and how it may impact their reliability as witnesses, there is increasing interest in determining the long-term effects of induced memories. The goal of the present research was to learn whether source misattributions found by Ceci, Huffman, Smith, and Loftus caused permanent memory alterations in the subjects tested. When 22 children from the original study were reinterviewed 2 years later, they recalled 77% of all true events. However, they only consented to 13% of all (...) false events, compared to the 22% false consent rate found by Ceci et al. . Additionally, while children remained accurate in their recall of true events , they “recanted” their earlier false consents 77% of the time, after the 2-year delay. Implications of these findings for child witnesses and the legal system are discussed. (shrink)

The veracity of children′s memory is frequently doubted because it is assumed that first, children′s memory is generally not very good, and second, children and their memories are too vulnerable to suggestibility to be credible. In this article these two assumptions are evaluated and three experiments are presented that address constraints on the construct of suggestibility. In the first experiment, it is reported that memory for a more frequently occurring event is more resistant to suggestibility than is memory for an (...) event experienced only once. This finding is especially relevant to memory for child abuse as it is common for perpetrators to frequently abuse the same child. In two additional experiments it is reported that it is relatively difficult to suggest to a child that something occurred when it did not. These results suggest that although memories for childhood events may be imperfect, they are not likely to be confabulated. (shrink)

Warning against warnings: Alerted subjects may perform worse. Misinformation, involvement and warning as determinants of witness testimony The article presents experiments exploring the memory misinformation effect. Subjects heard a recording and afterwards read a description of it, which included, in the misled group, some details inconsistent with the recording; finally thay answered questions about the recording. The aim of the research was to replicate the tainted truth effect, consisting in poor memory functioning of non-misled warned subjects and to check whether (...) a subject's involvement in the issue moderates this effect. Highly involved subjects were more resistant to the misinformation effect than those lowly involved. In the case of highly involved participants, warning was effective in reducing the misinformation effect, but it also caused more errors in the case of non-misled subjects. Thus, warning witnesses about nonexising discrepancies between what they saw/heard and what they were told, might lead to less accurate testimony. (shrink)