The “ants and jelly” experiment studied the semantic code of LTM. Subjects heard statements that were followed by a question (to make sure that they understood the statement thoroughly). The sentences could be comprised of any number of the four idea groupings: a girl and a window, ants and jelly, a tree, or a car on a hill. Each grouping had four propositions. A proposition is the smallest unit of knowledge that can be true or false. Each sentence had a various number of propositions in it. After reading the sentences, subjects were given a five-minute break with a filler task. They were then given a recognition test where they were asked if they had seen the statement – verbatim – in the learning phase of the experiment. They were also asked to rate their confidence in their answer, with +5 being extremely confident that they did see the sentence, and -5 being extremely confident that they did not see the sentence. The results show that the subjects cannot really tell the difference between old and new sentences, but the more propositions were packed into the sentence, the more confident they were that they saw the sentence before. WHY?!

3. Bartlett argued that memory is like a photograph and is largely reconstructive. He argued that we encode certain facts of events/information to get the “gist” of what’s going on, but that we tend to fill in the details from general knowledge stored in our semantic memory. For example, take Bartlett’s own evidence for this theory. He gave subjects a story and asked the subjects to recall the story 4 months later. When recalled, subjects had changed many aspects of the story. For example, subjects noted that the characters were sailing towards an island; in the story, they really had been canoeing in a river. A lot of the supernatural information had been omitted in the retelling as well, though the subjects sometimes reported a “ghost” (or really a “manifestation of breath”) to come out of the man’s mouth instead of something black. What was added-in are known as “normalizations” – they don’t come from episodic memory (the story itself) but rather semantic memory (the general knowledge how of things occur). What is episodic are the key facts – the gist of the story. The details are filled in from semantic memory.