Describe Bartlett's 'War of the Ghosts' study.

Sir Frederic Bartlett's 'War of the Ghosts' study is a classic in psychology, demonstrating the theory of reconstructive memory. He argued that memory is not like a video recording but is an active process where we reconstruct memories based on our pre-existing mental frameworks, or 'schemas'. By giving English participants a story from a different culture, he could observe how their own cultural schemas influenced their recall. The key transformations he noted were: assimilation (details changed to fit schemas), levelling (story became shorter as details were omitted), and sharpening (order of events changed to be more logical).