The third programme in the series looks at the work of British psychologist Sir Frederic Bartlett who discovered that when he asked people to repeat an unfamiliar story they had read, they changed it to fit their existing knowledge, and that it was the revised story which they memorised.
Bartlett's findings led him to propose 'schema' - the cultural and historical contextualisation of memory, which has important implications for eyewitness testimony, false memory syndrome, and even for artificial intelligence. Claudia Hammond investigates the impact of Bartlett's findings.