“Remembering is not the re-excitation of innumerable fixed, lifeless and fragmentary traces. It is an imaginative reconstruction, or construction, built out of the relation of our attitude towards a whole active mass of organized past reactions or experience, and to a little outstanding detail which commonly appears in image or in language form. It is thus hardly ever really exact, even in the most rudimentary form of rote recapitulation, and it is not at all important that it should be so.’ Thus remembering is a constructive act: ‘remembering appears to be far more decisively an affair of construction than one of mere reproduction…. condensation, elaboration and invention are common features of ordinary remembering.” (Bartlett 1932, p. 205).

Bartlett, F.C.( 1932). Remembering: A study in experimental social psychology. MA: Cambridge University Press.