- Effort after meaning: trying to make sense of an event in terms of what they already know
- Information may be remembered in a distorted way because they are imaginative reconstructions of the original information in light of each individual’s past experiences and expectations
- Schema: the mental structures that hold past experiences and expectations, stated that these could influence memories
- Rationalisation: altering something to make it make sense to the individual
- Confabulation: making up certain parts of an event to fill in a memory that is missing certain parts
- Perception: an active construction of what we think we see using prior knowledge
- Imaging: Bartlett used ink blots and asked the participants to describe what they imagined in the image, your own knowledge and experiences will influence what they saw, for example a child who grew up loving Batman films would more likely identify the blot with something related to Batman compared with a child who has never seen a single Batman film
