M ore than 60 years ago, British psychologist Frederick Bartlett issued what amounted to a consumer alert regarding a common mental product-memory. Remembering events one has witnessed or experienced rests on a process of mental construction that tends to build in errors and outright fabrications, Bartlett asserted in Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1932). In his most famous experiment, Bartlett had college students read a North American Indian folk tale, War of the Ghosts, and then tested their recall of it on several occasions. Individuals mangled the story more with each succeeding attempt to remember it, notably by changing elements of the legend to match their own expectations, altering the form of the story to that of an English fairy tale, and sometimes even adding a moral to it. People use frameworks of knowledge about the world based on prior experience to interpret and remember events, Bartlett theorized. This approach proves more efficient than cramming the brain with one memory after another, each stored in its entirety within a cavernous cerebral library, but it also creates the possibility of remembering things that never happened. Largely neglected for several decades after its publication, Bartlett's book now attracts lots of attention in the world of memory research. Investigations of memory errors and illusions have mushroomed in the past several years. This trend takes its inspiration from both the long-standing study of perceptual and judgmental errors in psychology and the recent bitter debate over the reality of recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse (SN: 9/18/93, p. 184). The conflict over lost and found memories of past traumas shows no sign of dissipating: Witness the final report of the American Psychological Association's working group on investigation of memories of childhood abuse, released in February. The group's six members-three clinicians who work with trauma victims and three psychologists who study the suggestibility of memory-agreed on a few general issues, such as the possibility that memories of abuse resurface after a period of forgetting and that psychotherapists or others can influence the construction of bogus memories. The bulk of the 239-page report, however, consists of an impassioned debate between the clinicians and the scientists. The clinicians point to evidence that sexual abuse can result in memory disturbances which interrupt recall but do not introduce false memories. The researchers emphasize studies demonstrating the relative ease with which misleading information and imagined events enter memory. Propelled by several highly publicized lawsuits against psychotherapists for allegedly conjuring up false memories of sexual abuse from their clients, a rising tide of studies examining what the researchers call implanted or illusory memory has deposited a thick layer of doubt atop any presumptions that recall of past events can be trusted. Memory's reputation has been tarnished lately, asserts Daniel L. Schacter, a Harvard University psychologist and author of Searching for (New York: Basic Books, 1996). Memory is by and large pretty accurate, but distortions can arise due to its constructive nature.