The Social Constructional Nature Of Human Memory

Since the 1980s, researches on memory have made many breakthroughs, establishing itself as one of the most dynamic and fruitful research areas in psychology. These breakthroughs manifest themselves not only in these down-to-earth researches, such as the discovery of various memory forms and the creation of many new terms and concepts, but also in a change about the understanding of the nature of memory, as a psychological phenomenon. The essence of this change is shifting from seeing memory as a recurrence of past experience to seeing memory as a product of social construction.Existing knowledge and expectations exercise a constructing function in every link of memory-coding, retaining, extracting-mostly in an unconscious way. During coding, the human brain, instead of photographing or copying the external information like a machine, transform the information into many unites that are meaningful to the individual and then save them. The coding method people use to process a certain thing varies from one another. During the retaining process, information that have already been coded may degenerate and alter with the elapse of time.Important information will be recounted and retained, less important ones will graduate degenerate or even vanish. Information may undergo qualitative changes so as to conform with existing knowledges and experiences and the current needs of the individual. During the extracting process, the final product is a combination of the features of current clues and the old memory trace.Investigation of the constructing process of memory illusion shows that the nature of construction not only manifests itself in the process of memory, but also in the result of memory.During coding, existing knowledge and experiences, on the one hand, screen the input information by controlling our attentive mode in receiving information, memories illusions therefore may rise when the screening is unreasonable; on the other hand, they induce plausible inferences by soliciting certain psychological expectations from us, and mistake these inferences for the stimuli itself, hence producing memory illusions. During the retaining process, the individual, on the one hand, constantly adjust and organize the acquired information according to existing knowledge and experiences, as a means of rationalization; on the other hand, it tend to forget or mix up the memory source, therefore resulting in memory illusions. During the extracting process, the individual , taken hint from the outside, often integrate the features of the clue into the memory traces.Social constructionism is a trend of thought that swept Western social science in the 1980s. From the social constructionism view, memory is not an independent process confined within the individual, but a result of collective creation which sinks its roots into the society and manifests itself in the constructive function of discourse. Firstly, discourse serves as a social root of mental schema , which dictates how an individual constructs a new memory; Secondly, discourse as a dynamic process of human communication, offer an individual to creat a memory with others.Thirdly, discourse as a remembering background ,in which one can reshapes the former memory.This social constructionism approach to memory is fundamentally different from the"reappearance of past experiences"approach; it is a transformation in understanding the nature of memory. he traditional reappearance approach believes that memory is the recurrence of past experiences, namely, experiences printing fixed traces on a special material- the human brain. And memory is the re-activation of the spots bearing such traces. And memory is something (an entity) stored in a certain region of the brain to be retrieved in the future, moreover, it is an exact copy of the past experience, and can be recovered or reproduced. This traditional approach is fundamentally individualism, it believes that memory is a representation or reflection of the external and objective world by the internal and subjective world, namely, the subject and the object are completely separate. While the social constructionism approach to memory has transcended the traditional thinking that separate the subject-object dichotomy, substituting social constructionism for the individually reflective approach, hence deepen the understanding of the nature of memory.The revelation of and reflection on the social constructionism nature of memory will surely contribute to expanding the theoretical vision of the scientific exploration of memory psychology. During the development of psychology as a kind of science, factors such as the society, culture and value are often dismissed or excluded from the scientific research field of psychology because they are seldom covered by current methodology systems. History has proved that such a scientism approach toward psychology is a negative force hampering the sound development of psychology.Through the reflection of social constructionism in the memory phenomenon, we can gain both theoretical and methodological revelations: in the scientific research of memory psychology, it is less wise to use methodology as a scale to tailor our research targets, than to seek a methodological revolution that will enable us to cover the entire memory phenomenon. Only in this way can we truly reveal and master the whole nature of memory, hence jointly promote the development of memory psychology.