Английский язык. Горчакова Е.П - 25 стр.

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     Freud saw certain kinds of forgetting as being motivated
by the forgetter’s need to avoid unbearably painful memories.
Though this kind of forgetting, repression, is purposeful in
that sense, the forgetter does not repress consciously.
Repression is automatic and unconscious.

     Laboratory experiments on Freudian forgetting theory are
few and not very convincing, but it may well be that because of
its very nature, repression does not lend itself to laboratory
analysis.

      Bartlett was the first to suggest that forgetting is a very
active and, in fact, creative process. We can see how Bartlett
approached the problem of memory by describing one of his
major experiments. He asked his subjects, British university
students, to read to themselves a 300- word North American
Indian folk tale and then to read it again. Fifteen minutes later
and at various intervals after that, he tested his students for
literal recall. These are some of the things he found:

     1. The general form of the students’ first recall was
        preserved throughout their future retelling of the tale.
     2. Elements of the original story (phrases or words) were
        changed so as to make sense to them. The phrase
        “hunting seals” was remembered as “fishing”; the more
        familiar “boat” replaced the original “canoe”.
     3. Various new details were invented by the subjects
        which made the story hang together better and also
        made it fit in better with British speech patterns,
        British customs, and British values.

      The final story the students remembered was often quite
different from the original one. The motive for “creative
forgetting” here is intellectual, because the purpose of
Bartlett’s students in forgetting “creatively” was to make the
material more meaningful.
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     The three main memory systems differ in the time they
can span, in how much they can carry, in their type of coding,
and in their forgetting mechanisms. Sensory memory lasts but
a fraction of a second. It can handle as much as the sense
organ can register. It depends on a fairly direct coding of the
image, which, after its fleeting instant, decays.