“An active process whereby various strategies are used during the process of memory retrieval to rebuild information from memory, filling in missing elements while remembering. It was first differentiated from reproductive memory in 1932 by the English psychologist Sir Frederic Charles Bartlett (1886-1969), who studied it with the technique of successive reproduction.”
Excerpted from: Colman, Andrew M., ed. Oxford Dictionary of Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.